[Fanfic] Vincere IV
Title: Vincere IV
Characters: Albion, Rome, Alba, Eire, Cymru, Saxony,
Rating: 15
Warnings: Depressingness, medieval history, suicidal notions, Arthurian legend creeping in.
Summary: What are you meant to do if even your family can't keep a promise to save you?
His siblings attack again, and again, sometimes bringing with them a strange, long haired man who Rome calls "Germania" and Albion somehow feels is familiar. He can't ask how he knows him; Cymru hasn't spoken to him for 20 years since the incident with the dragon. (Even though it's not really the last one, that Cymru's precious Red Dragon is asleep under a mountain.) Rome sighs and rolls his eyes and grumbles something about barbarians and whores.
Slowly, Rome's been talking to him less. His interest is waning, he's tired, and Albion occasionally catches him limping. Again, his only answer is a mutter about barbarians, and soon the young Nation understands that the term is more of an insult than he thought, growled out between the Roman's teeth.
The realisation hits him one day that Rome's scars are getting fresher.
---
Albion can barely breathe as he runs down the docks to try and catch the empire before he leaves. He fights and pushes his way through the crowd, a little barbarian child no higher than anyone's hip, using teeth if he has to. They sneer "Britunculi" at him, and he knows he is no different from his siblings in their eyes, but he has no time.
They're leaving.
"Rome!" He yells as the boat starts to pull away, running along the long jetty and slowing to a walk to keep up with the boat. The man in question looks curiously over the side of the ship and smiles, but it's weary. There are hundreds of soldiers with him, possibly the entirety of his forces that he had left over.
"Hey little Britannia." he greets, but a cold stone drops into the pit of Albion's stomach.
"When are you coming back?" the little boy calls, trying not to let the desperation show in his voice. This wasn't the first time Rome had left, but it was the first time he hadn't told him he was going.
The empire's smile turns a little sad. Albion hates it. "I don't know."
"How can't you know!" Albion cries, jogging to keep up as the boat moves into faster waters. "You know everything!"
Rome shakes his head, and doesn't say a word.
Albion doesn't notice the end of the docks, and ends up plunging straight into the freezing waters of the channel.
---
He lets himself wash up on the shores, somewhere by the white cliffs from which he takes his name. He doesn't want to swim, he doesn't even want to breathe. The whole world hates him, or has otherwise abandoned him. But the tide washes him inland, and unlike for many others, ignores his humble request to drown.
"I hate you." He mutters at the sea, the waves breaking and crashing and swirling around his ankles and his shoulders and his hands and his head. "I hate you." If it wasn't for the sea, he wouldn't be stuck on his stupid rainy island. He could just walk across to Rome, or even Gallia, to anyone who might give him a second glance.
"I hate you."
He is so small and weak and powerless that even a gentle tide can move him easily.
"I hate you."
He can't do any thing right. He can't even die right.
"I hate you."
Somewhere along the way, it's not the sea he hates.
---
"Hah!"
Alba's hard shove sends Albion rolling head over heels down the hill. It's the peak district, so it's really less of a hill and more of a cliff, scraggly and with bare patches of rock for him to break his bones on, and a few times he hits his head and stars burst before his eyes. He tries to blink them away, laying in a puddle at the bottom of the hill and staring up at where two dots of red hair are peering down at him.
"Nice one." gripes Eire, elbowing Alba in the side. "Now we can't go get him. Thanks a lot, idiot."
"Weren't my fault he's knocked over so easy now." Alba grumbles, rubbing his fake injury. Eire's elbows have always been pointy. "His precious Rome's gone runnin' home and all, he's got nobody to lean on."
"Hey Albion!" Eire taunts, kicking a rock down after him. It clatters by his ear. "Where's your darling Empire now, huh?"
"Matter o' fact." the eldest brother ponders thoughtfully. "Where's Cymru?"
"He's not talking to me." Albion replies dully, staring up at his siblings and wishing a painful, burning damnation on them and their people. The hate simmers in his stomach, replacing the cold empty loneliness for a while. "I killed his dragon."
Heavy set eyebrows shoot up in alarm. "Well shit, maybe we should tell him where tae find ya so he can beat the crap out of ye himself."
"Don't bother."
The other two turn to look at what's behind them, and though Albion can't see he knows who it is anyway.
"It's real creepy when you do that, you know that Cymru?" Alba laughs. The second youngest of them doesn't seem to be in a laughing mood.
"I don't forgive you, Albion." He says, and it's an absolute truth the second it comes out of his mouth. For his stubbornness and quickness to judge others by his own justice, one thing that Cymru is not is a liar. He favors the truth, in all its brutality. "I probably never will. But I am going to settle this." He draws in breath, looks down his nose. "I'm going to make you hurt, in equal measure to how you hurt me. And then," he breathes out between his teeth, and it hisses with traces of flame. "Then you'll think twice about killing dragons."
Maybe Albion's throat is swelling from the fall, because he can't breathe as well suddenly.
"I've called for reinforcements."
---
Germania is precisely as Rome described him. His face is always set in a frown, his hair is long and the same gold as Albion's, his clothes are animal hide and dyed cloths completely alien to those of Rome's people. His mouth spills words that England, on the furthest stretches of his mind, can vaguely understand. He understands, now, a little more about himself. He knows this man by a different name, Saxony. He used to come and see Mother many times. And while Saxony is much taller, and broader set, there is a faint kinship.
Ah, so that was why his siblings hated him.
The remaining Roman soldiers rebelled and disbanded long before the Saxon boats formed ridges in the sand of his coastline. England watches them drag horses and armor and shields from the boats, hears sandaled feet crunch on the rocky beaches, tastes salt and iron on the air and compares it to the taste of blood.
The fae are screaming again, delighted by this new challenge, and he wonders if he should tell the blonde haired, blue eyed invader how much he looks like his Roman nemesis.
The grass rustles behind him, and Cymru stands there. When had he grown taller than England?
His face is thunderous, and he doesn't say a word.
England, as ever, can only run away.
---
Rome never comes back. He probably never even gives half a thought to the little boy he left on those cold, rainy, windswept islands to the north west of his maps. Tucked away in the corner of the world, unnoticed.
Well fine.
Fine.
Nobody cared for him. He cared for nobody. He was independent now, and he was going to be just fine.
No matter how much the terror claws at his throat, or the cold empty hole in his stomach groans and aches.
He sleeps where he drops, in a barn of some lord's house, praying that the hay will give him some warmth and maybe stem the blood flow from the bruises and cuts that his brothers and Saxony have laid upon him. Maybe, if he's lucky, he'll die here. A horse might eat him, mixed in with the hay, and then Saxony would take over his land, and Cymru would take a bit too, and maybe even Alba would push down from the north, beyond the wall.
"Hey."
Albion rolls over. Of course it's hay, what kind of idiot didn't know that.
"Hey!" Says the voice again. It 's like his own, young and high and irritable. "Get off the hay, I know you're not dead. I have chores to do so move!"
Grumpily thinking of several ways to curse this boy so he could die in peace, Albion opens his eyes to stare at the scrawny child before him. He is a little taller than Albion, his hair a dusty blonde but his eyes are brown, and they scowl at him. His clothes denote him as a squire boy, a lowly servant at best. That explained why he was trying to get to the hay.
"Go away." Albion glares at him. The boy glares back, undaunted. "I'm trying to die."
"Well not on my hay you're not!" Boney hands pushed at him, trying to roll him off the pile of dried grass and stalks. "Go die outside."
"I'll die wherever I want!" Albion snapped, pushing back at the boy. Before either of them knew it, they were brawling on the floor, rolling around and pulling each other's hair, slapping at hands. They shouted names at each other that didn't even make sense, and more than once Albion insisted that the boy had bigger eyebrows than he did, a very confusing statement in that the boy's brows were of a normal size. It was all very immature, despite Albion knowing how to fight with a bow and arrow, or with a sword.
Finally they lay on their backs, straw kicked everywhere and stuck to their hair and clothes.
"What's your name?" asked the boy, panting and sucking on a graze on his wrist.
"Albion." replied the Nation, unsure why he'd given it away so freely. He expected the boy to laugh at him, to kick him again and call him a liar. But instead he turned his head to look at him, eyebrows raised and eyes wide.
"Wow." he breathed, an a wide smile split his face. "I'm Arth, but everyone calls me Wart."
"Oh." said Albion, turning to look at the boy too, with a frown on his face. "Why do they call you Wart?"
"Because I'm useless and pathetic." he shrugged one shoulder. "Or that's what they tell me. Kane at least."
"Well he's wrong." Albion assured, suddenly protective. He scowled at the thought. "I don't think you're useless and pathetic at all. I think you're interesting. I think you're gonna do something good. Something great."
A faerie giggled by his ear. What did she want now?
Wart was staring. "What is that?"
"What?"
"On your ear!"
Oh yes.
Arth was very interesting.
Notes:
- Albion's siblings spent a lot of the 300s attacking him and Rome. Like a LOT. Saxony started getting in on the action around 390AD
- Rome was also experiencing problems. He withdrew troops to help fight invasions of Italy back home, and gave Albion power over his own military for a while. He grew more and more distant, until he left entirely.
- In 408 Saxony, Ireland and Scotland launched a ruthless attack on England, who by that point was defenseless. The Roman soldiers had abandoned the country to it's own devices, but with no order of rule set up besides local lords, it was utter unorganised chaos and they were picked off very easily.
- It should be noted that while Scotland, Ireland and Wales are Celtic Nations, England is not. Largely, in population, language and genetics, England is Germanic. Even the name "Angle-land" from which England is derived, came from a tribe of Germans who came over to Britain. There is a part of England, Cornwall, which is still Celtic (has its own language and everything), so he does have some relation to the other Brits, but the South-East corner of England was settled by the Angles and then the Saxons again. So yes, England's a bit of a mixed blood baby, compared to his siblings.
- Arthurian legends are set in the 6th century, so around 500 AD. But since Arthur is a very lose mythological figure I'm shifting stuff around. If you want proper Arthurian legend fic then I direct you to the masterful mithrigil and her fic No Such Place which is awesome but long like a novel. But beautiful. Go read it.
That's the end of Vincere! Thanks for reading!
Characters: Albion, Rome, Alba, Eire, Cymru, Saxony,
Rating: 15
Warnings: Depressingness, medieval history, suicidal notions, Arthurian legend creeping in.
Summary: What are you meant to do if even your family can't keep a promise to save you?
His siblings attack again, and again, sometimes bringing with them a strange, long haired man who Rome calls "Germania" and Albion somehow feels is familiar. He can't ask how he knows him; Cymru hasn't spoken to him for 20 years since the incident with the dragon. (Even though it's not really the last one, that Cymru's precious Red Dragon is asleep under a mountain.) Rome sighs and rolls his eyes and grumbles something about barbarians and whores.
Slowly, Rome's been talking to him less. His interest is waning, he's tired, and Albion occasionally catches him limping. Again, his only answer is a mutter about barbarians, and soon the young Nation understands that the term is more of an insult than he thought, growled out between the Roman's teeth.
The realisation hits him one day that Rome's scars are getting fresher.
---
Albion can barely breathe as he runs down the docks to try and catch the empire before he leaves. He fights and pushes his way through the crowd, a little barbarian child no higher than anyone's hip, using teeth if he has to. They sneer "Britunculi" at him, and he knows he is no different from his siblings in their eyes, but he has no time.
They're leaving.
"Rome!" He yells as the boat starts to pull away, running along the long jetty and slowing to a walk to keep up with the boat. The man in question looks curiously over the side of the ship and smiles, but it's weary. There are hundreds of soldiers with him, possibly the entirety of his forces that he had left over.
"Hey little Britannia." he greets, but a cold stone drops into the pit of Albion's stomach.
"When are you coming back?" the little boy calls, trying not to let the desperation show in his voice. This wasn't the first time Rome had left, but it was the first time he hadn't told him he was going.
The empire's smile turns a little sad. Albion hates it. "I don't know."
"How can't you know!" Albion cries, jogging to keep up as the boat moves into faster waters. "You know everything!"
Rome shakes his head, and doesn't say a word.
Albion doesn't notice the end of the docks, and ends up plunging straight into the freezing waters of the channel.
---
He lets himself wash up on the shores, somewhere by the white cliffs from which he takes his name. He doesn't want to swim, he doesn't even want to breathe. The whole world hates him, or has otherwise abandoned him. But the tide washes him inland, and unlike for many others, ignores his humble request to drown.
"I hate you." He mutters at the sea, the waves breaking and crashing and swirling around his ankles and his shoulders and his hands and his head. "I hate you." If it wasn't for the sea, he wouldn't be stuck on his stupid rainy island. He could just walk across to Rome, or even Gallia, to anyone who might give him a second glance.
"I hate you."
He is so small and weak and powerless that even a gentle tide can move him easily.
"I hate you."
He can't do any thing right. He can't even die right.
"I hate you."
Somewhere along the way, it's not the sea he hates.
---
"Hah!"
Alba's hard shove sends Albion rolling head over heels down the hill. It's the peak district, so it's really less of a hill and more of a cliff, scraggly and with bare patches of rock for him to break his bones on, and a few times he hits his head and stars burst before his eyes. He tries to blink them away, laying in a puddle at the bottom of the hill and staring up at where two dots of red hair are peering down at him.
"Nice one." gripes Eire, elbowing Alba in the side. "Now we can't go get him. Thanks a lot, idiot."
"Weren't my fault he's knocked over so easy now." Alba grumbles, rubbing his fake injury. Eire's elbows have always been pointy. "His precious Rome's gone runnin' home and all, he's got nobody to lean on."
"Hey Albion!" Eire taunts, kicking a rock down after him. It clatters by his ear. "Where's your darling Empire now, huh?"
"Matter o' fact." the eldest brother ponders thoughtfully. "Where's Cymru?"
"He's not talking to me." Albion replies dully, staring up at his siblings and wishing a painful, burning damnation on them and their people. The hate simmers in his stomach, replacing the cold empty loneliness for a while. "I killed his dragon."
Heavy set eyebrows shoot up in alarm. "Well shit, maybe we should tell him where tae find ya so he can beat the crap out of ye himself."
"Don't bother."
The other two turn to look at what's behind them, and though Albion can't see he knows who it is anyway.
"It's real creepy when you do that, you know that Cymru?" Alba laughs. The second youngest of them doesn't seem to be in a laughing mood.
"I don't forgive you, Albion." He says, and it's an absolute truth the second it comes out of his mouth. For his stubbornness and quickness to judge others by his own justice, one thing that Cymru is not is a liar. He favors the truth, in all its brutality. "I probably never will. But I am going to settle this." He draws in breath, looks down his nose. "I'm going to make you hurt, in equal measure to how you hurt me. And then," he breathes out between his teeth, and it hisses with traces of flame. "Then you'll think twice about killing dragons."
Maybe Albion's throat is swelling from the fall, because he can't breathe as well suddenly.
"I've called for reinforcements."
---
Germania is precisely as Rome described him. His face is always set in a frown, his hair is long and the same gold as Albion's, his clothes are animal hide and dyed cloths completely alien to those of Rome's people. His mouth spills words that England, on the furthest stretches of his mind, can vaguely understand. He understands, now, a little more about himself. He knows this man by a different name, Saxony. He used to come and see Mother many times. And while Saxony is much taller, and broader set, there is a faint kinship.
Ah, so that was why his siblings hated him.
The remaining Roman soldiers rebelled and disbanded long before the Saxon boats formed ridges in the sand of his coastline. England watches them drag horses and armor and shields from the boats, hears sandaled feet crunch on the rocky beaches, tastes salt and iron on the air and compares it to the taste of blood.
The fae are screaming again, delighted by this new challenge, and he wonders if he should tell the blonde haired, blue eyed invader how much he looks like his Roman nemesis.
The grass rustles behind him, and Cymru stands there. When had he grown taller than England?
His face is thunderous, and he doesn't say a word.
England, as ever, can only run away.
---
Rome never comes back. He probably never even gives half a thought to the little boy he left on those cold, rainy, windswept islands to the north west of his maps. Tucked away in the corner of the world, unnoticed.
Well fine.
Fine.
Nobody cared for him. He cared for nobody. He was independent now, and he was going to be just fine.
No matter how much the terror claws at his throat, or the cold empty hole in his stomach groans and aches.
He sleeps where he drops, in a barn of some lord's house, praying that the hay will give him some warmth and maybe stem the blood flow from the bruises and cuts that his brothers and Saxony have laid upon him. Maybe, if he's lucky, he'll die here. A horse might eat him, mixed in with the hay, and then Saxony would take over his land, and Cymru would take a bit too, and maybe even Alba would push down from the north, beyond the wall.
"Hey."
Albion rolls over. Of course it's hay, what kind of idiot didn't know that.
"Hey!" Says the voice again. It 's like his own, young and high and irritable. "Get off the hay, I know you're not dead. I have chores to do so move!"
Grumpily thinking of several ways to curse this boy so he could die in peace, Albion opens his eyes to stare at the scrawny child before him. He is a little taller than Albion, his hair a dusty blonde but his eyes are brown, and they scowl at him. His clothes denote him as a squire boy, a lowly servant at best. That explained why he was trying to get to the hay.
"Go away." Albion glares at him. The boy glares back, undaunted. "I'm trying to die."
"Well not on my hay you're not!" Boney hands pushed at him, trying to roll him off the pile of dried grass and stalks. "Go die outside."
"I'll die wherever I want!" Albion snapped, pushing back at the boy. Before either of them knew it, they were brawling on the floor, rolling around and pulling each other's hair, slapping at hands. They shouted names at each other that didn't even make sense, and more than once Albion insisted that the boy had bigger eyebrows than he did, a very confusing statement in that the boy's brows were of a normal size. It was all very immature, despite Albion knowing how to fight with a bow and arrow, or with a sword.
Finally they lay on their backs, straw kicked everywhere and stuck to their hair and clothes.
"What's your name?" asked the boy, panting and sucking on a graze on his wrist.
"Albion." replied the Nation, unsure why he'd given it away so freely. He expected the boy to laugh at him, to kick him again and call him a liar. But instead he turned his head to look at him, eyebrows raised and eyes wide.
"Wow." he breathed, an a wide smile split his face. "I'm Arth, but everyone calls me Wart."
"Oh." said Albion, turning to look at the boy too, with a frown on his face. "Why do they call you Wart?"
"Because I'm useless and pathetic." he shrugged one shoulder. "Or that's what they tell me. Kane at least."
"Well he's wrong." Albion assured, suddenly protective. He scowled at the thought. "I don't think you're useless and pathetic at all. I think you're interesting. I think you're gonna do something good. Something great."
A faerie giggled by his ear. What did she want now?
Wart was staring. "What is that?"
"What?"
"On your ear!"
Oh yes.
Arth was very interesting.
Notes:
- Albion's siblings spent a lot of the 300s attacking him and Rome. Like a LOT. Saxony started getting in on the action around 390AD
- Rome was also experiencing problems. He withdrew troops to help fight invasions of Italy back home, and gave Albion power over his own military for a while. He grew more and more distant, until he left entirely.
- In 408 Saxony, Ireland and Scotland launched a ruthless attack on England, who by that point was defenseless. The Roman soldiers had abandoned the country to it's own devices, but with no order of rule set up besides local lords, it was utter unorganised chaos and they were picked off very easily.
- It should be noted that while Scotland, Ireland and Wales are Celtic Nations, England is not. Largely, in population, language and genetics, England is Germanic. Even the name "Angle-land" from which England is derived, came from a tribe of Germans who came over to Britain. There is a part of England, Cornwall, which is still Celtic (has its own language and everything), so he does have some relation to the other Brits, but the South-East corner of England was settled by the Angles and then the Saxons again. So yes, England's a bit of a mixed blood baby, compared to his siblings.
- Arthurian legends are set in the 6th century, so around 500 AD. But since Arthur is a very lose mythological figure I'm shifting stuff around. If you want proper Arthurian legend fic then I direct you to the masterful mithrigil and her fic No Such Place which is awesome but long like a novel. But beautiful. Go read it.
That's the end of Vincere! Thanks for reading!