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Northern Waters	By : Domina_Ecca Category: +G to L > Hetalia: Axis Powers Views: 1538 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Hetalia - Axis Powers and I'm not making profit off of this story.

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Ludwig was only aware of pain. It washed over him in intense waves, pinning him down, drowning him. He was cold, or was he hot? There was thump that sounded far away and he settled on hot. Slowly, he tried to lift his arms, finding that there was a blanket resting on him. Although his arms seemed to weigh more than he remembered and he temporarily thought that his blanket was a net, he managed to push it back a little, sighing when he felt the cold air brush his skin.
The cold was intense though, enough to being to awaken his sensed, and as everything settled, he became aware of a dull throbbing in his left leg and in both of his feet.
Slowly, as if underwater, he tried to pull his memories of what had happened forward. They were fuzzy and came slowly, but after a bit he was able to remember that he was a solider. His name was Ludwig Beilschmidt of the German army. Wincing when he tried to move his leg, he guessed that was the reason behind this. Yet, he had no memory of a battle. He couldn’t have accidently been injured, could he?
The sound of someone letting out a deep breath had his ears suddenly pricking up. His head hurt, but he still felt himself go on guard. Slowly, he willed himself to open his eyes.
The light wasn’t very bright, but it made his head ache a little worse. Gradually, his eyes focused and began to register things. A room. A bed. His army jacket slung over the bedpost. It was clear this was no military camp. The strange thought that it was someone’s home was enough to get him to raise his head a little bit to look around more. Then, he saw what had sighed.
A man sat in a chair in the corner near the window, facing him. He was tall, and his long legs reached out far as he sat, but he was slumped over, apparently asleep. Below him, he saw a book lying open on the floor, and guess what had made the thumping noise earlier. He studied what he could see of his face and his outfit, but had no idea who he was. It was no one he had known, and he was not wearing a uniform. Then, he spotted the gun in his lap, and his back stiffened a bit.
Could this be an enemy?
He had heard of other soldiers being taken captive even in neutral nations. They could be sold. Ludwig swallowed nervously, but then realized that if he had been captured, he would have probably been tied up, not left to rest on a bed. Slowly, the fear faded back, and he thought about it again.
He was obviously injured; perhaps this man had helped him? Raising his hand slowly, he saw the cuts and dried bits of blood and dirt, and when it put it to his head, he felt a bandage there. Ludwig felt a sick churning in his stomach, and realized that beyond everything—the pain, the fear, the confusion—he was hungry. He wondered how long it had been since he’d last eaten.
After a moment, he tried to adjust himself a bit, but the bed creaked loudly as he did so and the man in the chair bolted upright. Their eyes locked hard, but he was stunned by their intensity. In a strange way, he immediately felt as if he had been caught doing something wrong, and had somehow angered the man across the room.
There was a long, uncomfortable stretch of silence while the man in the chair slowly stood, his gun still in his hand. Ludwig’s throat constricted and he tried to move back as he came forward.
“I’m not gonna hurt ya,” he said in awkward German.
Ludwig stared for a moment, but then nodded to acknowledge that he had understood.
“How do ya feel?” the tone, if nothing else, gave away the fact that he had probably never left Sweden in his entire life.
He shook his head a bit as an answer, and then looked back at him. “Where am I?”
The tall Swede stared down at him intensely for a moment before answering, as if appearing to want to test something with the silence.
“Sweden.”
Ludwig almost felt annoyed; he had guessed that much. “How did I get here?”
He shrugged to indicate that he didn’t know. “Only carried ya here from the forest,”
The forest…fuzzy and incomplete flashes of memory shot across his eyes. He saw stars, billions of them, but it hurt to look up that high, and soon branches closed over him, seeming to grab him and pull him in. And then, nothing.
“I’ll make breakfast. Wait here.” he said and before Ludwig could respond, he was out the door.
He stared after him for a minute, and then looked around again, feeling strangely out of place. He tried to shake it off, which hurt, and began to check himself over. He was covered in heavy, dark bruises, but the only actual injuries were on his forehead, leg, and feet. His feet didn’t look so bad, and his forehead didn’t feel so bad, but his leg burned horribly, and it was only after a minute that he realized that it had been stitched back together. He wondered if he could even walk on it. The thought of putting his boots back on made his empty stomach churn, however, so he stopped thinking about it.
It was impossible to be patient in a situation such as his, but being stranded in a stranger’s bed didn’t leave him many options other than to sit still in order to cause himself as little pain as possible, and try to remember what had happened.
He had been assigned to go north, while his brother, Gilbert, had been assigned to go south. Ludwig wasn’t sure why he was given the less dangerous assignment, having always proven himself capable in combat, even if the nightmares were relentless for weeks after. Yet, he couldn’t really remember much after getting on the train. The train was nice, he remembered liking it, but there was something else. Something sinister lingered on the edges of his memories, staining them with dark blotches of something he wasn’t able to identify, nor look at directly. It was making his head hurt and his hands grow restless.
He was later fed by the Swede, but it felt awkward because he didn’t leave while he ate. The taller man simply sat down again with the gun and a cup of coffee and watched him most of the time. Occasionally he had looked out the window, since the curtains were now open, or at the book after retrieving it from the floor, but mostly he watched him. Ludwig tried not to look back when he felt the weight of those blue eyes on him because it would only result in a damned staring contest until he asked if everything tasted alright.
To his surprise, the food had actually been delicious. Once he had eaten, his head didn’t throb so much, and his feet didn’t bother him at all unless he touched them together. The Swede took his plate without a word when he finished, and again Ludwig watched him go. He wasn’t sure what was happening and guess that he would just have to wait for the man to tell him.
Upon returning, their eyes met, and they stared at each other intensely again.
To his surprise, the man shifted awkwardly on his feet. “I’m Berwald,”
It took him a moment to realize he was introducing himself, and nodded his head. “Ludwig Beilschmidt.”
He nodded back, but then appeared to be satisfied enough to fall back into silence. That wouldn’t do; Ludwig couldn’t stand not knowing anymore.
“So, what now?” he asked lamely, brushing his hair back a bit with one hand.
Berwald moved his heavy gaze down to his bandaged calf. “Leg needs to heal,”
“…And,” he said when the platinum blond didn’t continue. “Does anyone know I’m here?”
He shook his head. “Ya haven’t been here long.”
Ludwig looked down, feeling defeated at being unable to continue the conversation.
“Just rest. I’ll be out here if ya need somethin’,” he said abruptly, shutting the door again and walking down the hall.
Regardless of everything going through his mind, he obeyed and lied back down. There were still fuzzy thoughts of something bad and random flashes of his brother telling him things, but somehow his sunk passed it all, and his mind dove down into unconsciousness. Thinking back later, he thought that it could have been the unbelievably comfortable bed that had put him to sleep.
When he awoke again, it wasn’t slowly.
Ludwig bolted awake and in that instant, everything was clear. He remembered it all: he was deserting.
There had been some kind of problem, a plot, made by people he had assumed to be comrades. Once on the train, they had tried to frame him. Tried to make him out to be a double-agent, and his superior, someone Ludwig had fought under and put his life on the line countless times for, believed them. The sense of betrayal had been so overwhelming that Ludwig didn’t even fight it when they tied him up for what was to be the rest of the trip. Once in the north, they were to have him arrested and sent back to Germany. The thought was horrifying. He knew what happened to double-agents.
Yet, once he had recovered from the initial shock, there had been nothing left but anger. It had destroyed everything he’d ever known or believed in. So, he decided he would abandon it, the same way everything had abandoned him. In the dead of night, he had escaped. It was challenging, and was actually where he had gotten the cut on his head from, but on his way to the back of the train he had passed the sleeping, defenseless faces of those who had once stood by him and who had turned on him. He knew he could have killed him all just like that, but, he didn’t. He just turned and left. Once he made it to the back of the train, it wasn’t long until he spotted a fairly flat space, and jumped. The landing had been terrifying, and was where the bruises had come from, but he lied there in the snow until the train was far enough away for fear of people keeping watch.
Overall, his escape from the train seemed almost painfully easy. It hurt, to think that it all could have just ended so quickly, that everything he had thought he’d lived for, everything he was prepared to die for was gone, lost. Still, Ludwig wasn’t one to sit and mope in the snow in the freezing night of Swedish valley, so he got up and moved on, heading in search of a road he could follow.
That’s where things gone from bad to worse. He had indeed found the road, but something else found him. Although Sweden was still stubbornly neutral to the war all around it, there were people in its midst who weren’t. They went out of their way to find the battle, and to fight it. These were the people who happened to find him.
At first, he had scared the hell out of them. A German, alone but armed looked suspicious, and he guessed that they had assumed they were caught doing whatever they might have been doing. Yet, somehow, they came to realize that he was exactly what he looked like, and after pulling up next to him on the road, the two of them had gotten out of the car. Ludwig clutched at his gun, not aiming it, but ready to. They were armed as well though.
Once of them smiled. It made him sick.
He didn’t speak their language, but he knew it wasn’t Swedish. It was too different. He shouted back in German, but they didn’t appear to understand him. It scared the smaller of the two a bit though, and had taken the smile off of the other’s face. That had pleased him, momentarily. Next thing he knew, he had taken a shot to his leg, and was forced to fire in return in order to save his life. After he fired, the taller one grunted, and had begun to sink to the ground. The other immediately went from attack to defense, and when Ludwig began to run away, he had let him go. There was something weird in that one’s eyes.
He had run until the pain had become unbearable, but then he walked. It felt like he walked for years. He wondered if he had been delirious from blood loss, but he had seen a light. A window, maybe? Yet it had vanished, and he had found himself among trees, and in the end he collapsed, certain he was dead.
Slowly, his heart began to speed up, making his leg ache with each beat. A single, glaring thought took up the entirety of his mind: he had to make sure no one knew he was here. He couldn’t go back. He wouldn’t. He was defecting. Ludwig almost scoffed. Could it even be called defecting for a traitor to break rank? The thoughts made him angry and sick, but he swallowed and breathed, and tried to think of what he would do.
Slowly, his mind turned his eyes to the window.
Sweden.
Maybe, just maybe, he could stay here. It was neutral, it was vast, and he could disappear into it, never to be found by the Germans or the world ever again. Yes, his mind latched onto this idea with enough power to almost break it. This is what he would do. But first thing come first and he turned his head towards the door. What to do about the Swede who had saved him?
Apparently, he hadn’t told anyone he was here yet, but could he trust that? The man—Berwald, was it?—had rescued him, so he obviously wasn’t like the ones who had shot him, but he didn’t appear to support Germany either. Not that that would do him any good anymore. Maybe he could just wait until he was healed. After all, he didn’t know really anything about the culture, he didn’t speak the language, and all he had was his uniform and his gun—
…All he had was his uniform.
A part of his mind timidly urged him to just tell his host the truth, but he shut it down harshly. No one could trust a traitor. It hurt, but that’s what he was, regardless of the fact that his country had betrayed him first, he had betrayed it back. Somehow, that was worse.
The door opened, making him jump and then wince in pain.
“Sorry.” Berwald muttered and then raised the fresh bandages he brought. “Need to change them.”
Ludwig nodded and he approached the bed almost cautiously. Ludwig began to wonder if he was afraid of him. After all, he was a solider, and Berwald was not. Despite the gun at his side, if he wanted to, Ludwig guess that once he healed just a bit more, he could fight his way out with relative ease, regardless of the fact that Berwald was bigger.
He sat on the edge of the bed, which creaked and tilted a little as it accepted his weight, and then he stared intensely at his forehead. Ludwig held perfectly still while he was assessed, and then closed his eyes while Berwald removed the old bandage, cleaned the wound, and reapplied a clean one. It wasn’t too painful, but he knew that it must have bled terribly. Head wounds were like that.
With a nod to himself, Berwald moved down to his leg and, after receiving a nod from Ludwig, lifted it and began to unwind the bandage. He winced, feeling the bandage tug at the stitches, but was surprised to see how well of a job he had done. He had been certain he was going to lose his damned leg over that wound.
Berwald raised his eyebrows at him in what Ludwig eventually realized was concern, and then Ludwig shook his head. It wasn’t too painful, but he appreciated that Berwald hadn’t asked him outright. He cleaned it with startlingly careful hands, and reapplied the bandage quickly, wasting no time. Ludwig also appreciated this.
When he got to his feet, however, Ludwig had to bite his tongue. They were raw and sore, and every time a bit of skin stuck to the bandage it sent a bolt of sharp pain up his leg, making him want to retract them. Berwald tried to be careful, but wasn’t slow. He apparently knew the need to get things over with quickly, without drawing them out. As Ludwig watched him work, he began to wonder if he really was the only soldier in the room. Few eyes were as steady as Berwald’s, even among some of the oldest fighters.
Finally, he finished and replaced the bandages around both of his feet. Once they were wrapped, the sharp pain faded to a hot, dull throbbing that Ludwig could deal with. Then, the tall Swede simply stood at the edge of the bed, staring at him, as if waiting.
He didn’t know if he was going to speak, but before he could, there was a sickening knock at the front door.
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Northern Waters