part 353 whalers on the moon

[aphanon_meme]

We've been here over a year now! I can hardly believe it! Dreamwidth's been pretty good, I'd say, with almost no downtime to speak of and all that! Anyway... how is your spring going? Or I guess it's almost summer, isn't it? Hopefully it's been well! I've been catching up on work and new movies, all very exciting stuff, I'm sure.

Enjoy part 353!

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München Hauptbahnhof

[(Anonymous)]

More bad older brothers eh.

Munich, 1990

It’s been an odd century, East can’t help but to think. He feels weird, because he still isn’t sure about whatever it is that is happening with him at the moment, if he misses the past or hopes for a bright new future now. Maybe a mix of both.

He leaves Berlin from Alexanderplatz in the earliest hours of the morning. It’s just Berlin, now, he can’t help but to think. There no East, no West, only the sun over Tiergarten, the sounds of the construction sites that haven’t stopped ever since the war and a large, still burning scar that he knows will probably never heal. He’s left the car next to his flat on Karl-Marx Allee, because he couldn’t possibly bear having his brother laugh at him for taking pride in such a shit car. The train ride is a long one, from Berlin to the south, but it feels nice, in a way, to be able to leave the city and see the countryside rolling under wheels of steel.

He’d rather not think about the last time he came here, really, but he has to, in a way. He’s spent the last forty years convincing himself that he was something he wasn’t, with the same efficiency he’d shown in the art of war, peace and politics, back when his name, his real name, still meant something. He can remember the flags, now, the sound of that Wagner’s operas and speeches that they all listened to with a frightful obedience.

It’s funny because West and him still haven’t talked about it, about the war and about how all of them wished so hard that they would take over the world. East doesn’t know if he wants to talk about it, about the other names he once bore and about the terrible winter that had been the downfall of the monsters they had all become.

When the wall fell, West had rushed to Berlin in his shiny car, his blue jeans and his expensive shoes, and East had been happy to see him, even though it seemed like they didn’t really speak the same language anymore, words the same but their meaning somewhat different to their ears. West had grown softer around the edges, in a way, quieter, humbler, and doting, asking East strange questions about Russia’s treatment of him and if he could do anything to help in any way. East would have laughed, really, because West had always been so clueless. While it had been shit to wait around in line for a new pair of shoes, to attend those godawful meetings they would hold once in awhile in Moscow or to watch out for whatever would come out of his mouth whenever he’d find that a few of the books in his personal library had been switched around, he couldn’t really say that it had all been terrible, the summers in the Datsche Russia had gifted him on a whim and the evenings spent trying to figure out how to repair that cardboard car’s motor on the kitchen table. He’d missed West and he’d hated the empty comedic speech of socialist officials, and he had been scared, sometimes, of the grey men in their grey lives, watching him and his shitty plastic furniture in his bugged apartment and waiting for an excuse to send him back to the empty cell and the empty corridors of Bautzen.

And yet here he is now, in Munich’s main station, with his cheap synthetic clothes and his overnight bag thrown over his shoulder. Time had flown by. Saxony had left, just like the others, at last, on their side of the wall, bidding East goodbye with a tap on the shoulder, a good-natured laugh and the promise that he would kick his ass for all the shit East had done in this life when he’d join him on the other side. It had made East laugh, and promise him to give a good fight, when the time would come.

It’s strange to see him, now that it’s just the two of them and the kid. Bavaria isn’t like West, and he doesn’t forgive or forget nowhere near as easily, and maybe he still hates East. It seems like he is the same as he has ever been, with his short, messy blond hair and his large shoulders, his towering height and his meaty fingers that East, a century ago, would have joked about. He gives East a large wave, an odd kind of surprised expression that felt out of place on his features, and they walk towards each other.

To say that Bavaria and him have history together would be an understatement. East had trouble with West, of course he did, and they would fight and bitch once in awhile, but they haven’t messed each other up nearly as much as East and Bavaria did in the last three centuries. It’s a matter of time, and of occasions to stab each other in the back.

Finally they face each other, in the train station that is slowly filling up with the morning crowd. They observe each other for a moment. Bavaria looks like an American, almost, with his clothes that are far more relaxed and casual than West’s will ever be, and East can’t help but to feel a bit self-conscious about his own appearance. They’re not the same as they were, all those years ago, back when they both had names that weren’t exactly the same, other dreams and the burning desire to strangle each other, when the moment would be right.

“You got skinny,” Bavaria says, and he pinches East’s bicep with a half-smile.
“You got fat.”

Bavaria laughs.

“It’s good to see you again, brother. Even if you’re still an idiot fish-headed northerner with no manners and terrible beer.”
“Same. But you know, without the fish-headed northerner part. You’re an idiot alcoholic southerner.”

It’s not a reconciliation, because there are too many wars, too many scars and too many years between the two of them, and it would be foolish of them to try to forget them, but it’s a cease-fire. They won’t forget, they probably won’t forgive, but they won’t fight, because the both of them know that their time is past, now, and that this, all of this, isn’t about them anymore. And so they talk, as Bavaria drives the both of them to his house, about the years that they spent away from each other, about half-forgotten memories and stories about that time when Austria got so drunk on Oktoberfest Hungary had to nurse his hangover for a whole week, or the funny accent Holstein used to have back when he still lived with Denmark.

It’s an odd century that is coming to an end soon, and East wonders if they’ll manage to get the best out of each other, Bavaria and him, this time around. He hopes they will, for their own sake, and for West's.

*

Re: München Hauptbahnhof

[(Anonymous)]

Omg anon, anon! I love this series of historical germanbros fic you've written, so great!