Sub Specie Aeternitatis, part one (Axis Powers Hetalia, America and the Endless)
It is kind of my goal in life to cross over everything ever with the Sandman. Therefore, this.
Let me not to the marriage of true anthropomorphic personifications admit impediment, after all.
Title: Sub Specie Aeternitatis, part one
Author: puella_nerdii, though credit/blame is, as always, due to mithrigil.
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia, crossed with the Sandman (though knowledge of either canon should suffice. Or neither canon; anthropomorphic personifications have a way of making themselves understood.)
Characters: America and, in this half, Destiny, Dream, Desire, and Destruction.
Rating: R, for sexuality and intimations of violence, and you can guess whose faults those are.
Words: 4100 without footnotes.
Summary: Even countries are bound by the forces that embody this world.
present day, and long before that:
This is something he only half-remembers, something that surfaces when he’s half-awake and half-asleep as the night lightens to dawn and dew beads on the windowpanes, something from before he was a country and before he knew he could become one:
There is a garden in America’s backyard, one he only finds when he isn’t looking for it. The first time it happens, it’s an accident; he’s tromping through the marshes of the bay that isn’t called the Chesapeake yet. Muck soaks him to the shins, saltwater stings his feet, the sun breaks through the clouds and beams down on his nose and he spreads his arms out wide and he’s laughing, laughing, laughing-
-laughing until his feet aren’t wet anymore. He wriggles his toes, but there’s no muck squelching between them, just sand crunching and gravel skittering. He walks forward: pitter-patter, pitter-patter, and when his feet grind into the sand the sound scrapes his ears. The garden looks like everything, he still smells the marshes and sees long flat patches that remind him of the plains in the south and stumbles over rocks cropping up from the ground the way he does up north. But he’s never seen this place before, he’d remember if he had. The sun burns the sky orange but it still smells like night here, night and dust and secrets.
Maybe the sand’s trying to whisper to him. He stoops down and puts his ear to the ground, but he’s not sure if the thumping and scratching he hears comes from the earth or if it’s just sounds trapped in his ears and bouncing around.
“It is both,” someone says above him, and America flings himself to his feet because he didn’t hear any footsteps, and he should’ve.
The man is long and skinny and dark like a shadow stretching out under the sun. He holds a book-no, he’s chained to the book, America sees that when the folds of his robe shift and the links rattle and gleam silver. He traces a line across the page with the tip of his finger and America wonders what all the dusty old designs on the cover mean-they’re like the paths in the garden, as soon as he follows one it branches and splits off into more and more paths, and then those paths split until he can’t remember where he started or how he got there, just that he did somehow.
“Who’re you?” he asks.
“Destiny,” the man says.
That’s pretty simple, except it’s not. America’s forehead puckers. “Just Destiny?”
“I am what I am, and no more.”
He doesn’t know what to say about that, so he squints and the man, Destiny, sort of shimmers for a second. Maybe this is a dream? But no, the man said he was Destiny and that’s not the same thing, right? “Is this where you live?” And then, “And where is here?”
“This is my garden,” Destiny says. “You know it well, for you have walked its paths since your inception.”
“No I haven’t.” His place isn’t so-well, it’s old, it’s old but it’s not at the same time because he keeps on finding new things in it, new rivers to splash in and new hills to roll down and new meadows to run through and new rocks to clamber over. And it’s quiet and not at the same time just like this place is, the grass rustles and the leaves stir there like the sand crunches here. But his place doesn’t feel like this one, doesn’t feel like…it’s not just that things are happening here and will happen here, it’s that they have happened and the sand under his feet isn’t just sand it’s rubble, ash. I’m stepping on dead things, he thinks.
Destiny sweeps to the right, slow stately steps, and America trots after him, tries not to trip over the hem of his shift. “This is the first time you have seen it for what it is.”
“I know what my place looks like,” he says, “it’s-”self-evident springs to mind, but he files that one away to use later. He cranes his neck to look up at Destiny, at the shadows over Destiny’s eyes, and-oh. “How do you know what I see? How do you know what you see,” he continues, “you’re blind, aren’t you?”
“My vision is of a different kind than yours,” Destiny says, extends a weathered finger and points off into the horizon. “Can you see the turns this path takes beyond that line? Can you follow the forks and branches?”
He squints, shades his eyes with his hand, shakes his head, and says, “It’s too far away.”
“That is where our ways of seeing differ,” he says. “I know where these paths lead.”
“So you-can you see the future?” He rocks forward on his heels, up, closer to that long gaunt face with hollows for eyes. “Do you know what’s going to happen?”
Destiny’s finger skids across the page, slows down. “Yes.”
“Can you tell me?”
“No.”
“Why not?” And he’s not whining, he isn’t. “If it’s already in your book and everything…”
“It is not in your nature to know where you are going,” Destiny says, and starts to walk again, too fast this time, he takes such wide strides and America’s legs aren’t long enough to keep up, his breath slices through his chest as he runs forward, chases him, tries to snatch the hem of Destiny’s robe, something, anything…
“But I’m going somewhere!” he calls. “Right?”
Somewhere…maybe even somewhere special?
Destiny doesn’t turn back. Destiny never does.
***
September 3, 1783
His Brittanic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and independent states, that he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs, and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety, and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof.
There are other parts of the treaty, of course, stuff about returning prisoners of war and all the property and income he confiscated from Loyalists and setting up the boundaries between him and the lands England still owns and giving everyone six months to ratify the thing and even granting fishing rights (which he guesses the states up north will be happy about), but he keeps reading Article One again and again and again until the words blur.
He did it. It’s over. He’s independent. He’s won.
Well, technically it’s been over since Cornwallis surrendered because England wasn’t too keen on sending in troops after that and his bosses balked at the idea even more than he did, but America knows by now that writing things down is how you get other countries to recognize what you did. And now it’s written down, and England has to treat him like a real country now, not a colony, a real country. That he treats with them as such. It’s in the treaty, it’s in ink, he signed it and so did America and then Hartley shook hands with Adams, Franklin and Jay and now Franklin’s showing the other two around Paris and America’s still at the Hôtel de York holding the treaty close to his chest and shaking. He knew this would happen, knew it had to (and he won’t listen to any thoughts that say otherwise, not now), and it did and now, now…
He doesn’t even see the Rue Jacob when he looks out the window, just his home, his beautiful bountiful home and the thick forests and rushing rivers and ripening fields and he can’t cry now because he can’t smudge this treaty, he really can’t smudge this treaty, but the ink glistens and shines the way his eyes must be.
Hartley’s probably back at the British Embassy by now. Holy shit, America’s going to get embassies. Embassies and ambassadors and delegations and dignitaries and all the other things governments have, except for kings. And maybe not taxes, either, he’s still working that out. He asked France if England was going to show up, but France said no, England hates coming to the Continent and he’s not the one getting sovereignty, he doesn’t need to be here for this, I think he’s headed off to India for a while. And America said India. Figures.
He’s too-he’s too many other things to think about India right now, though. It’s like a dream but it’s not. It dizzies him.
He pillows his forehead on the glass, looks down at the squashed-together buildings and the squashed-together people milling through the streets and says, “I’m not going to be like that. I’m going to be something new.”
“And what do you intend to be, America?”
He lurches forward and bangs his forehead into the window, says “ow,” and pivots around, rubbing the lump with the heel of his palm. “Lord Morpheus-are you still Lord Morpheus?” he asks, because he remembers that’s how England used to address him when the King of Dreams showed up; America’s only met him once or twice before, but he’s not really someone you forget, not after you’ve felt the burn of his eyes on yours. The King of Dreams is-like them but not, England never explained it very well, and America shouldn’t need to rely on England’s explanations anymore, anyway, he can figure this out on his own and Lord Morpheus is right there if he wants to ask. So.
“I am,” he says, “and others besides. You already have so many names for me in your country.”
Your country makes him swell with pride a little. “New ones?”
“Some. Some are old, older than you know. And some are cobbled together from fragments of other names, other stories.”
Making new things out of old ones. He can get behind that. “So you’re saying it’s okay if I just call you Morpheus, right? Since we don’t have lords at home anymore.”
“What I am called-” Morpheus hesitates. “To a degree, what I am called denotes what I am. But I do not need titles. I am sovereign in my realm, and that is enough.”
“Like me,” America says. “We’re not going to have lots of titles, either. We’re just going to be who we are.”
“And what is that?”
“Hm?”
“Who are you?” Morpheus asks again.
“I’m myself,” he says. “Just like you’re yourself. I dunno, it means a lot of things to be me. Doesn’t it mean a lot of things to be you?”
“That much is true of anything with a name.” Morpheus’s hands ghost over the curtains, draw them shut-it’s nighttime, America realizes, or nearly, he didn’t even notice, he’s been here but not-here for-he almost says god only knows how long but he catches himself. “Do you know why England addresses me as he does?”
The treaty crinkles and creases in America’s hand. “What, the lord part?”
“My name. Or the name he gives me,” he adds. “Morpheus.”
America scratches the back of his neck, tugs his fingers under his collar as he tries to think-his collar’s starting to wilt from all the sweat eroding the starch, and he’d crack the window open but the air in Paris is even heavier, even stiller, even thicker with heat and salt. “It’s Latin, isn’t it?” he asks. “Doesn’t it mean sleep?” If he’s right, it’s kind of a bland nickname, but England’s never been the most inventive guy.
“No,” he says. “It is Greek, from morphe. Morpheus: he who shapes. The Greeks gave this name to their god of dreams.”
“Which is where the sleep part comes in,” America finishes. “Right. So what does shaping have to do with dreams, again?”
“We are such stuff as dreams are made of,” and Morpheus turns his head without moving the rest of his body at all; the twin stars in his eyes twinkle, and he waits.
“Shakespeare,” he says. “That’s Shakespeare. But I didn’t think Shakespeare had anything to do with Greece, either.” He hasn’t met Greece yet-hasn’t met a lot of countries yet, come to think of it, he’s heard stories about them and some of his people brought back reports of wild Africa and hidden India and stately old Europe and he’ll see all of them someday, but things have been so busy at home lately and he hasn’t had time to do everything he wants to. But he’ll get that time soon, now that the other countries have to recognize him for what he is. Who he is.
“They are all part of your past, America.”
“Well yeah, but that’s the past,” he points out. “That’s not who I am now. I have all these dreams, these new ones, and I think I can actually do them, I-there’s no one else like me, is there?”
“No,” Morpheus says. “But there is no one else like anyone else.”
***
February 27, 1845
England, England, England. Why does it always come back to England?
Oh, and-America’s glasses slide off his nose when his head nods forward; the wick’s burning really low on his lamp and he probably needs to get a new one soon-and what the hell does England want Texas for, anyway? Trade relations, he says. Bullshit. He’s trying to screw with America’s ability to export, that’s what it is, sneak around the tariffs and trick Texas into abolishing slavery and regardless of America’s feelings on that one the point is that he promised he’d cut all this shit out. And America found Oregon first, dammit, England has the whole world and America just wants what’s his, just the land it makes sense for him to have, just the land his people need-and they do, they do need it, because he itches to go west just as badly as they do, he wakes up every morning with the sun behind him and stares as the rays stretch across the sky, over him, past him, and he wants to do it too, he wants to dash out of stupid stuffy DC with its stupid stuffy senators and run run run west until he dips his toes in the Pacific Ocean. This is his land, his country, and if nothing else, he has to make that clear. Which is why his pen’s clamped between his teeth and he’s drumming his fingers on his desk and watching the shadows shift on his paper, trying to think of how he can put this, everything, in words.
Dear Mr. President-elect,
And that’s as far as he’s gotten.
He snatches the letter off his desk, crumples it, grits his teeth. Fuck it, he can just talk to Polk if he has to, the annexation vote’s coming up tomorrow and that’s Polk’s thing, that’s what he spent his campaign talking about, filled America’s head with pictures of rolling prairies and shining seas and now America can’t get them out of there, can’t stop picturing himself standing on top of one of those purple-peaked mountains he’s heard so much about and surveying the world stretched before him…anyway, Polk has to be around here somewhere. He swings himself out of his chair, stretches, strolls to the door-
-someone pushed something under his door. He stoops down; there’s a paper wedged in the crack between the door and the floor. He wriggles it out, thinks he might’ve torn it a little, grunts, frowns, squints at the article on the front page…
Tyrants of the old world! condemners of the rights of man! disbelievers in human freedom and equality! enemies of mankind! console not yourselves with the delusion, that Republicanism and the American Union are synonymous terms-or that the downfall of the latter will be the extinction of the former, and, consequently, a proof of the incapacity of the people for self-government, and a confirmation of your own despotic claims!
“Shit.”
He looks at the headline: The Liberator. Damn. Damn damn-who left this here? Doesn’t matter, not thinking about it, he yanks his desk drawer open and shoves The Liberator inside and slams it back shut and he is not thinking about this right now.
“I just want to see the Pacific Ocean,” he says to the wall.
And at this point, he shouldn’t be surprised when someone answers, “Well, what’s preventing you?” but he still almost jumps out of his shoes.
The most beautiful woman-man-person-America’s ever seen lounges against the wall, coattails untucked and the first few buttons of her-his-shirt undone. America stares, searches for clues, for cues, but he zeroes in on bright red lips and close-cropped hair so dark it sucks the light into it and eyes that gleam the same way his lamp does and all he can tell is that this person isn’t…this person’s more than not human, this person’s inhuman.
“Treaties,” he says, though the sudden lack of moisture in his throat cracks his voice. A lot. “Mostly. Do I know you?” He doesn’t add because I want to but uh. Yeah.
“To see me is to know me,” he, or she, says, peels away from the wall and extends his (or her) hand out, fingers reaching and pointed, and America takes them; his (or her) nails are neat, sharp, peaked. Mountains, he thinks, staggers back, doesn’t and can’t let go but staggers back until he collapses into his chair with her (or him) standing over him, shining like a knife in the dark.
“I want,” he says, and his tongue thickens too much for him to go on.
“The Pacific Ocean?” She (he) chuckles, soft and dark. “Is that all?”
“No,” he breathes, groans when the backs of his (her) nails caress his cheek, trace his jaw.
She-he-America just can’t tell, and maybe the fog on his glasses blurs things but he thinks it’s more that this person, this not-person, makes things blur-it leans closer, draws attention to the jut of its collarbones, the lithe line of its neck, the smooth white planes of its skin…
“Unbroken lines,” it says just as America’s thinking it, and smiles. Its teeth gleam, the points-wait, the points-the points glisten, and America gets a picture of those teeth closing down on him that’s way clearer than he wants it to be, way clearer because in the picture he’s biting back, grabbing touching taking. “Unbounded, uncompromised.”
“Well yeah,” he says, swallows when the spit dries in his throat, “I’ve never been big on boundaries-”
“Then take what Providence has given you.” Its fingers trail down his chest, tapping. “Spread. Expand,” and its thumb hooks in America’s waistband and America takes the suggestion, rolls his hips up until his back contracts, arches off the chair, shivers, and the shiver travels through his legs, breaks up his breath, god he can’t remember the last time he was this hard. “Grow,” it says.
He flushes to the root, aches everywhere, from the cut on his lip to the spaces between his fingers to the hollows behind his knees, everything. He buries his face in its chest and wraps his arms around it, maps its skin with his fingertips and feels fields, forests, streams, deserts, and he reaches for them and more-newsprint flashes through his mind: a confirmation of your own despotic claims-
“Is it despotic,” it whispers, “to grant your people their God-given rights?”
“Nn-” Its hands, cold and hot all at once or maybe the burn just makes chills set in, its hands slip past his waistband, unfasten and part his trousers. “No…”
“Are you a despot because your people love you?” Thumbs on his thighs, tracing a path in, up- “Because your people dream with you, dream for you? They want this for you.”
“God-”
“God, too, if you like.” Its lips sear the hollow of his throat and America can feel the smirk on them, feel the hint of teeth. “They want you, America,” and his name whispered against his skin like that, the way the words burn into him, he bucks forward and up and doesn’t, can’t stop, he has to, just like-just like he has to expand, he has to-
“I want,” he gasps, before it blocks his mouth.
***
April 9, 1865
The duel’s a formality. Alan’s gun isn’t loaded.
Grant closes McLean’s door behind him, probably tracks mud all over the threshold, he’s tired, they’re all tired. If he sees America standing there, pistol gripped in his hand, he doesn’t show it.
Did-did Alan tell Lee? He must have; America glimpses Lee through the window, back straight, beard clipped, boots polished, brass buttons gleaming. He keeps the three stars pinned to the collar of his uniform grays. America can’t begrudge him that.
“We won’t count paces,” he says, and Alan-America’s never been able to call him the Confederacy, he’s always just called him Alan-works his jaw, looks hurt but doesn’t say anything, and America wishes he could trust him not to stop at nine paces instead of ten and turn around and fire while America’s back is turned. This is a gentleman’s agreement, they’re supposed to play by gentlemen’s rules of engagement now after they-they-ignored them for so long. Antietam festers inside him, Bull Run and Shiloh and Gettysburg and Vicksburg and razed Atlanta but Antietam most of all, Antietam is the one he smells when he puts on his blues, mud and gunpowder and scorched corn and blood, blood stiffening and staining the cloth enough that he’ll never scrub it out. And after that he can’t turn his back on Alan even though he handed Alan the pistol, the one with no bullets in it, and Alan knows the chamber’s empty…
“You’ll tell us when to fire,” he says to the third man, the one he isn’t allowed to name or the one who abandoned his name, America’s not sure which one it is and he doesn’t really want to ask. “Right?”
“I will,” the man says. His beard’s not quite the color of Lee’s buttons, there’s too much red in his hair for that.
There’s nothing left to say. They all know where to go from this. “Ready?” America asks.
And Alan says, “I am,” so America half-turns, walks forward but looks back over his shoulder while he does, stares at the back of Alan’s uniform, sees how the gray swallows up the color in Alan’s hair and makes it look flat. The grass curls under his boots; buds sprout from the tips of the trees overhead. It’s spring. He has to remind himself that it’s spring, that spring came this year.
“Fire,” the man says, and America wonders how many times he’s said that before, how many times he’s triggered this, how many triggers he-
America whips around on his heel, ignores the sun glinting off his glasses, fires. He’s a good shot, and he has been since England taught him how to handle a gun. He can’t see whether or not Alan squeezes the trigger, there’s just no sound, no sound except the crack of his own pistol, the rustling in the trees (why are there birds up there, in the branches? You’d think they’d have learned better by now), the final choked gasp as Alan falls; America closes his eyes before he hits the ground.
When he opens them-“There’s no body,” he says.
“There wouldn’t be, with your kind,” the man says. “When you die, you cease to exist.”
“I thought that was universal.”
“I meant that you leave nothing behind. Nothing tangible.” The man picks his black slouch hat off the ground, dusts off the brim. “Mapmakers redraw their lines, and it’s as though you were never there at all.”
America hears scuffling and scraping inside the house, chairs pushed back, boots pounding the floor. A few heads cluster at the window before-he squints-looks like Grant and Lee are calling their men back to their sides, telling them not to investigate the gunshot. Is it just him, or are the men in gray uniforms standing a little more slumped now?
“He’s been subsumed into you,” the man says. “Only memories are left.”
“Yeah, well,” America says, “what are you supposed to do with those?”
The man’s eyes smolder in their sockets, America’s not even exaggerating, they’re not just like banked coals, they are banked coals. “Create new ones.”
***
The Treaty of Paris, when the United Kingdom formally recognized United States sovereignty. (The fighting between the UK and the US effectively ceased after Yorktown, but British and French fleets kept fighting in the West Indies for a while, because the United Kingdom and France didn’t need much of an excuse to fight.
Congress approved a joint resolution to annex Texas on February 28, 1845, a move that caused a lot of bitter argument because Texas was admitted to the Union as a slave state. Not to mention the fact that Mexico declared war on the United States shortly thereafter. Manifest Destiny was a compelling rationale for a lot of Americans back in the 1840s, though. The Liberator was an abolitionist newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison from 1831 to 1866; The American Union appeared in the January 10, 1845 issue.
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomatox, effectively ending the Civil War. (Interestingly enough, Wilmer McLean’s home, where Grant and Lee negotiated the terms of the surrender, was also used as headquarters by General P.G.T. Beauregard during the First Battle of Bull Run, which was the first major battle of the war.)
The title, “sub specie aeternitatis,” roughly means “from the perspective of eternity” and is shamelessly stolen from Spinoza, though I rather doubt America’s ever read Spinoza.
Part Two will be posted either tomorrow or Wednesday, depending on how I want to space things out.
On to Part Two
Let me not to the marriage of true anthropomorphic personifications admit impediment, after all.
Title: Sub Specie Aeternitatis, part one
Author: puella_nerdii, though credit/blame is, as always, due to mithrigil.
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia, crossed with the Sandman (though knowledge of either canon should suffice. Or neither canon; anthropomorphic personifications have a way of making themselves understood.)
Characters: America and, in this half, Destiny, Dream, Desire, and Destruction.
Rating: R, for sexuality and intimations of violence, and you can guess whose faults those are.
Words: 4100 without footnotes.
Summary: Even countries are bound by the forces that embody this world.
present day, and long before that:
This is something he only half-remembers, something that surfaces when he’s half-awake and half-asleep as the night lightens to dawn and dew beads on the windowpanes, something from before he was a country and before he knew he could become one:
There is a garden in America’s backyard, one he only finds when he isn’t looking for it. The first time it happens, it’s an accident; he’s tromping through the marshes of the bay that isn’t called the Chesapeake yet. Muck soaks him to the shins, saltwater stings his feet, the sun breaks through the clouds and beams down on his nose and he spreads his arms out wide and he’s laughing, laughing, laughing-
-laughing until his feet aren’t wet anymore. He wriggles his toes, but there’s no muck squelching between them, just sand crunching and gravel skittering. He walks forward: pitter-patter, pitter-patter, and when his feet grind into the sand the sound scrapes his ears. The garden looks like everything, he still smells the marshes and sees long flat patches that remind him of the plains in the south and stumbles over rocks cropping up from the ground the way he does up north. But he’s never seen this place before, he’d remember if he had. The sun burns the sky orange but it still smells like night here, night and dust and secrets.
Maybe the sand’s trying to whisper to him. He stoops down and puts his ear to the ground, but he’s not sure if the thumping and scratching he hears comes from the earth or if it’s just sounds trapped in his ears and bouncing around.
“It is both,” someone says above him, and America flings himself to his feet because he didn’t hear any footsteps, and he should’ve.
The man is long and skinny and dark like a shadow stretching out under the sun. He holds a book-no, he’s chained to the book, America sees that when the folds of his robe shift and the links rattle and gleam silver. He traces a line across the page with the tip of his finger and America wonders what all the dusty old designs on the cover mean-they’re like the paths in the garden, as soon as he follows one it branches and splits off into more and more paths, and then those paths split until he can’t remember where he started or how he got there, just that he did somehow.
“Who’re you?” he asks.
“Destiny,” the man says.
That’s pretty simple, except it’s not. America’s forehead puckers. “Just Destiny?”
“I am what I am, and no more.”
He doesn’t know what to say about that, so he squints and the man, Destiny, sort of shimmers for a second. Maybe this is a dream? But no, the man said he was Destiny and that’s not the same thing, right? “Is this where you live?” And then, “And where is here?”
“This is my garden,” Destiny says. “You know it well, for you have walked its paths since your inception.”
“No I haven’t.” His place isn’t so-well, it’s old, it’s old but it’s not at the same time because he keeps on finding new things in it, new rivers to splash in and new hills to roll down and new meadows to run through and new rocks to clamber over. And it’s quiet and not at the same time just like this place is, the grass rustles and the leaves stir there like the sand crunches here. But his place doesn’t feel like this one, doesn’t feel like…it’s not just that things are happening here and will happen here, it’s that they have happened and the sand under his feet isn’t just sand it’s rubble, ash. I’m stepping on dead things, he thinks.
Destiny sweeps to the right, slow stately steps, and America trots after him, tries not to trip over the hem of his shift. “This is the first time you have seen it for what it is.”
“I know what my place looks like,” he says, “it’s-”self-evident springs to mind, but he files that one away to use later. He cranes his neck to look up at Destiny, at the shadows over Destiny’s eyes, and-oh. “How do you know what I see? How do you know what you see,” he continues, “you’re blind, aren’t you?”
“My vision is of a different kind than yours,” Destiny says, extends a weathered finger and points off into the horizon. “Can you see the turns this path takes beyond that line? Can you follow the forks and branches?”
He squints, shades his eyes with his hand, shakes his head, and says, “It’s too far away.”
“That is where our ways of seeing differ,” he says. “I know where these paths lead.”
“So you-can you see the future?” He rocks forward on his heels, up, closer to that long gaunt face with hollows for eyes. “Do you know what’s going to happen?”
Destiny’s finger skids across the page, slows down. “Yes.”
“Can you tell me?”
“No.”
“Why not?” And he’s not whining, he isn’t. “If it’s already in your book and everything…”
“It is not in your nature to know where you are going,” Destiny says, and starts to walk again, too fast this time, he takes such wide strides and America’s legs aren’t long enough to keep up, his breath slices through his chest as he runs forward, chases him, tries to snatch the hem of Destiny’s robe, something, anything…
“But I’m going somewhere!” he calls. “Right?”
Somewhere…maybe even somewhere special?
Destiny doesn’t turn back. Destiny never does.
***
September 3, 1783
His Brittanic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and independent states, that he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs, and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety, and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof.
There are other parts of the treaty, of course, stuff about returning prisoners of war and all the property and income he confiscated from Loyalists and setting up the boundaries between him and the lands England still owns and giving everyone six months to ratify the thing and even granting fishing rights (which he guesses the states up north will be happy about), but he keeps reading Article One again and again and again until the words blur.
He did it. It’s over. He’s independent. He’s won.
Well, technically it’s been over since Cornwallis surrendered because England wasn’t too keen on sending in troops after that and his bosses balked at the idea even more than he did, but America knows by now that writing things down is how you get other countries to recognize what you did. And now it’s written down, and England has to treat him like a real country now, not a colony, a real country. That he treats with them as such. It’s in the treaty, it’s in ink, he signed it and so did America and then Hartley shook hands with Adams, Franklin and Jay and now Franklin’s showing the other two around Paris and America’s still at the Hôtel de York holding the treaty close to his chest and shaking. He knew this would happen, knew it had to (and he won’t listen to any thoughts that say otherwise, not now), and it did and now, now…
He doesn’t even see the Rue Jacob when he looks out the window, just his home, his beautiful bountiful home and the thick forests and rushing rivers and ripening fields and he can’t cry now because he can’t smudge this treaty, he really can’t smudge this treaty, but the ink glistens and shines the way his eyes must be.
Hartley’s probably back at the British Embassy by now. Holy shit, America’s going to get embassies. Embassies and ambassadors and delegations and dignitaries and all the other things governments have, except for kings. And maybe not taxes, either, he’s still working that out. He asked France if England was going to show up, but France said no, England hates coming to the Continent and he’s not the one getting sovereignty, he doesn’t need to be here for this, I think he’s headed off to India for a while. And America said India. Figures.
He’s too-he’s too many other things to think about India right now, though. It’s like a dream but it’s not. It dizzies him.
He pillows his forehead on the glass, looks down at the squashed-together buildings and the squashed-together people milling through the streets and says, “I’m not going to be like that. I’m going to be something new.”
“And what do you intend to be, America?”
He lurches forward and bangs his forehead into the window, says “ow,” and pivots around, rubbing the lump with the heel of his palm. “Lord Morpheus-are you still Lord Morpheus?” he asks, because he remembers that’s how England used to address him when the King of Dreams showed up; America’s only met him once or twice before, but he’s not really someone you forget, not after you’ve felt the burn of his eyes on yours. The King of Dreams is-like them but not, England never explained it very well, and America shouldn’t need to rely on England’s explanations anymore, anyway, he can figure this out on his own and Lord Morpheus is right there if he wants to ask. So.
“I am,” he says, “and others besides. You already have so many names for me in your country.”
Your country makes him swell with pride a little. “New ones?”
“Some. Some are old, older than you know. And some are cobbled together from fragments of other names, other stories.”
Making new things out of old ones. He can get behind that. “So you’re saying it’s okay if I just call you Morpheus, right? Since we don’t have lords at home anymore.”
“What I am called-” Morpheus hesitates. “To a degree, what I am called denotes what I am. But I do not need titles. I am sovereign in my realm, and that is enough.”
“Like me,” America says. “We’re not going to have lots of titles, either. We’re just going to be who we are.”
“And what is that?”
“Hm?”
“Who are you?” Morpheus asks again.
“I’m myself,” he says. “Just like you’re yourself. I dunno, it means a lot of things to be me. Doesn’t it mean a lot of things to be you?”
“That much is true of anything with a name.” Morpheus’s hands ghost over the curtains, draw them shut-it’s nighttime, America realizes, or nearly, he didn’t even notice, he’s been here but not-here for-he almost says god only knows how long but he catches himself. “Do you know why England addresses me as he does?”
The treaty crinkles and creases in America’s hand. “What, the lord part?”
“My name. Or the name he gives me,” he adds. “Morpheus.”
America scratches the back of his neck, tugs his fingers under his collar as he tries to think-his collar’s starting to wilt from all the sweat eroding the starch, and he’d crack the window open but the air in Paris is even heavier, even stiller, even thicker with heat and salt. “It’s Latin, isn’t it?” he asks. “Doesn’t it mean sleep?” If he’s right, it’s kind of a bland nickname, but England’s never been the most inventive guy.
“No,” he says. “It is Greek, from morphe. Morpheus: he who shapes. The Greeks gave this name to their god of dreams.”
“Which is where the sleep part comes in,” America finishes. “Right. So what does shaping have to do with dreams, again?”
“We are such stuff as dreams are made of,” and Morpheus turns his head without moving the rest of his body at all; the twin stars in his eyes twinkle, and he waits.
“Shakespeare,” he says. “That’s Shakespeare. But I didn’t think Shakespeare had anything to do with Greece, either.” He hasn’t met Greece yet-hasn’t met a lot of countries yet, come to think of it, he’s heard stories about them and some of his people brought back reports of wild Africa and hidden India and stately old Europe and he’ll see all of them someday, but things have been so busy at home lately and he hasn’t had time to do everything he wants to. But he’ll get that time soon, now that the other countries have to recognize him for what he is. Who he is.
“They are all part of your past, America.”
“Well yeah, but that’s the past,” he points out. “That’s not who I am now. I have all these dreams, these new ones, and I think I can actually do them, I-there’s no one else like me, is there?”
“No,” Morpheus says. “But there is no one else like anyone else.”
***
February 27, 1845
England, England, England. Why does it always come back to England?
Oh, and-America’s glasses slide off his nose when his head nods forward; the wick’s burning really low on his lamp and he probably needs to get a new one soon-and what the hell does England want Texas for, anyway? Trade relations, he says. Bullshit. He’s trying to screw with America’s ability to export, that’s what it is, sneak around the tariffs and trick Texas into abolishing slavery and regardless of America’s feelings on that one the point is that he promised he’d cut all this shit out. And America found Oregon first, dammit, England has the whole world and America just wants what’s his, just the land it makes sense for him to have, just the land his people need-and they do, they do need it, because he itches to go west just as badly as they do, he wakes up every morning with the sun behind him and stares as the rays stretch across the sky, over him, past him, and he wants to do it too, he wants to dash out of stupid stuffy DC with its stupid stuffy senators and run run run west until he dips his toes in the Pacific Ocean. This is his land, his country, and if nothing else, he has to make that clear. Which is why his pen’s clamped between his teeth and he’s drumming his fingers on his desk and watching the shadows shift on his paper, trying to think of how he can put this, everything, in words.
Dear Mr. President-elect,
And that’s as far as he’s gotten.
He snatches the letter off his desk, crumples it, grits his teeth. Fuck it, he can just talk to Polk if he has to, the annexation vote’s coming up tomorrow and that’s Polk’s thing, that’s what he spent his campaign talking about, filled America’s head with pictures of rolling prairies and shining seas and now America can’t get them out of there, can’t stop picturing himself standing on top of one of those purple-peaked mountains he’s heard so much about and surveying the world stretched before him…anyway, Polk has to be around here somewhere. He swings himself out of his chair, stretches, strolls to the door-
-someone pushed something under his door. He stoops down; there’s a paper wedged in the crack between the door and the floor. He wriggles it out, thinks he might’ve torn it a little, grunts, frowns, squints at the article on the front page…
Tyrants of the old world! condemners of the rights of man! disbelievers in human freedom and equality! enemies of mankind! console not yourselves with the delusion, that Republicanism and the American Union are synonymous terms-or that the downfall of the latter will be the extinction of the former, and, consequently, a proof of the incapacity of the people for self-government, and a confirmation of your own despotic claims!
“Shit.”
He looks at the headline: The Liberator. Damn. Damn damn-who left this here? Doesn’t matter, not thinking about it, he yanks his desk drawer open and shoves The Liberator inside and slams it back shut and he is not thinking about this right now.
“I just want to see the Pacific Ocean,” he says to the wall.
And at this point, he shouldn’t be surprised when someone answers, “Well, what’s preventing you?” but he still almost jumps out of his shoes.
The most beautiful woman-man-person-America’s ever seen lounges against the wall, coattails untucked and the first few buttons of her-his-shirt undone. America stares, searches for clues, for cues, but he zeroes in on bright red lips and close-cropped hair so dark it sucks the light into it and eyes that gleam the same way his lamp does and all he can tell is that this person isn’t…this person’s more than not human, this person’s inhuman.
“Treaties,” he says, though the sudden lack of moisture in his throat cracks his voice. A lot. “Mostly. Do I know you?” He doesn’t add because I want to but uh. Yeah.
“To see me is to know me,” he, or she, says, peels away from the wall and extends his (or her) hand out, fingers reaching and pointed, and America takes them; his (or her) nails are neat, sharp, peaked. Mountains, he thinks, staggers back, doesn’t and can’t let go but staggers back until he collapses into his chair with her (or him) standing over him, shining like a knife in the dark.
“I want,” he says, and his tongue thickens too much for him to go on.
“The Pacific Ocean?” She (he) chuckles, soft and dark. “Is that all?”
“No,” he breathes, groans when the backs of his (her) nails caress his cheek, trace his jaw.
She-he-America just can’t tell, and maybe the fog on his glasses blurs things but he thinks it’s more that this person, this not-person, makes things blur-it leans closer, draws attention to the jut of its collarbones, the lithe line of its neck, the smooth white planes of its skin…
“Unbroken lines,” it says just as America’s thinking it, and smiles. Its teeth gleam, the points-wait, the points-the points glisten, and America gets a picture of those teeth closing down on him that’s way clearer than he wants it to be, way clearer because in the picture he’s biting back, grabbing touching taking. “Unbounded, uncompromised.”
“Well yeah,” he says, swallows when the spit dries in his throat, “I’ve never been big on boundaries-”
“Then take what Providence has given you.” Its fingers trail down his chest, tapping. “Spread. Expand,” and its thumb hooks in America’s waistband and America takes the suggestion, rolls his hips up until his back contracts, arches off the chair, shivers, and the shiver travels through his legs, breaks up his breath, god he can’t remember the last time he was this hard. “Grow,” it says.
He flushes to the root, aches everywhere, from the cut on his lip to the spaces between his fingers to the hollows behind his knees, everything. He buries his face in its chest and wraps his arms around it, maps its skin with his fingertips and feels fields, forests, streams, deserts, and he reaches for them and more-newsprint flashes through his mind: a confirmation of your own despotic claims-
“Is it despotic,” it whispers, “to grant your people their God-given rights?”
“Nn-” Its hands, cold and hot all at once or maybe the burn just makes chills set in, its hands slip past his waistband, unfasten and part his trousers. “No…”
“Are you a despot because your people love you?” Thumbs on his thighs, tracing a path in, up- “Because your people dream with you, dream for you? They want this for you.”
“God-”
“God, too, if you like.” Its lips sear the hollow of his throat and America can feel the smirk on them, feel the hint of teeth. “They want you, America,” and his name whispered against his skin like that, the way the words burn into him, he bucks forward and up and doesn’t, can’t stop, he has to, just like-just like he has to expand, he has to-
“I want,” he gasps, before it blocks his mouth.
***
April 9, 1865
The duel’s a formality. Alan’s gun isn’t loaded.
Grant closes McLean’s door behind him, probably tracks mud all over the threshold, he’s tired, they’re all tired. If he sees America standing there, pistol gripped in his hand, he doesn’t show it.
Did-did Alan tell Lee? He must have; America glimpses Lee through the window, back straight, beard clipped, boots polished, brass buttons gleaming. He keeps the three stars pinned to the collar of his uniform grays. America can’t begrudge him that.
“We won’t count paces,” he says, and Alan-America’s never been able to call him the Confederacy, he’s always just called him Alan-works his jaw, looks hurt but doesn’t say anything, and America wishes he could trust him not to stop at nine paces instead of ten and turn around and fire while America’s back is turned. This is a gentleman’s agreement, they’re supposed to play by gentlemen’s rules of engagement now after they-they-ignored them for so long. Antietam festers inside him, Bull Run and Shiloh and Gettysburg and Vicksburg and razed Atlanta but Antietam most of all, Antietam is the one he smells when he puts on his blues, mud and gunpowder and scorched corn and blood, blood stiffening and staining the cloth enough that he’ll never scrub it out. And after that he can’t turn his back on Alan even though he handed Alan the pistol, the one with no bullets in it, and Alan knows the chamber’s empty…
“You’ll tell us when to fire,” he says to the third man, the one he isn’t allowed to name or the one who abandoned his name, America’s not sure which one it is and he doesn’t really want to ask. “Right?”
“I will,” the man says. His beard’s not quite the color of Lee’s buttons, there’s too much red in his hair for that.
There’s nothing left to say. They all know where to go from this. “Ready?” America asks.
And Alan says, “I am,” so America half-turns, walks forward but looks back over his shoulder while he does, stares at the back of Alan’s uniform, sees how the gray swallows up the color in Alan’s hair and makes it look flat. The grass curls under his boots; buds sprout from the tips of the trees overhead. It’s spring. He has to remind himself that it’s spring, that spring came this year.
“Fire,” the man says, and America wonders how many times he’s said that before, how many times he’s triggered this, how many triggers he-
America whips around on his heel, ignores the sun glinting off his glasses, fires. He’s a good shot, and he has been since England taught him how to handle a gun. He can’t see whether or not Alan squeezes the trigger, there’s just no sound, no sound except the crack of his own pistol, the rustling in the trees (why are there birds up there, in the branches? You’d think they’d have learned better by now), the final choked gasp as Alan falls; America closes his eyes before he hits the ground.
When he opens them-“There’s no body,” he says.
“There wouldn’t be, with your kind,” the man says. “When you die, you cease to exist.”
“I thought that was universal.”
“I meant that you leave nothing behind. Nothing tangible.” The man picks his black slouch hat off the ground, dusts off the brim. “Mapmakers redraw their lines, and it’s as though you were never there at all.”
America hears scuffling and scraping inside the house, chairs pushed back, boots pounding the floor. A few heads cluster at the window before-he squints-looks like Grant and Lee are calling their men back to their sides, telling them not to investigate the gunshot. Is it just him, or are the men in gray uniforms standing a little more slumped now?
“He’s been subsumed into you,” the man says. “Only memories are left.”
“Yeah, well,” America says, “what are you supposed to do with those?”
The man’s eyes smolder in their sockets, America’s not even exaggerating, they’re not just like banked coals, they are banked coals. “Create new ones.”
***
The Treaty of Paris, when the United Kingdom formally recognized United States sovereignty. (The fighting between the UK and the US effectively ceased after Yorktown, but British and French fleets kept fighting in the West Indies for a while, because the United Kingdom and France didn’t need much of an excuse to fight.
Congress approved a joint resolution to annex Texas on February 28, 1845, a move that caused a lot of bitter argument because Texas was admitted to the Union as a slave state. Not to mention the fact that Mexico declared war on the United States shortly thereafter. Manifest Destiny was a compelling rationale for a lot of Americans back in the 1840s, though. The Liberator was an abolitionist newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison from 1831 to 1866; The American Union appeared in the January 10, 1845 issue.
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomatox, effectively ending the Civil War. (Interestingly enough, Wilmer McLean’s home, where Grant and Lee negotiated the terms of the surrender, was also used as headquarters by General P.G.T. Beauregard during the First Battle of Bull Run, which was the first major battle of the war.)
The title, “sub specie aeternitatis,” roughly means “from the perspective of eternity” and is shamelessly stolen from Spinoza, though I rather doubt America’s ever read Spinoza.
Part Two will be posted either tomorrow or Wednesday, depending on how I want to space things out.
On to Part Two