Ngl I Think I’m Tentatively Now In The “Yao Had Short Hair For Most Of The 20th Century” Club 🤔.

The way you draw the squishy baby faces are so adorable- If you have the time and motivation I'd love to see the babies hang out together! Since Alfred and Matthew are a bit older they are probably really curious about the baby Lud!

I gotchu, Anon! I like to imagine Ludwig took his first steps towards them

I'm so sorry if I'm bothering, but reading "The Captain" has seriously floored, contaminated and infected me and I'm making a playlist inspired by it - But I was wondering if you had thoughts on Alfred and his people in that context? Because I... Like cowboy Alfred and I can't emphasize enough how many stories would emerge from Alfred losing a dual, lying dead on the ground, just to be gone by dawn and seen again in the next town over on death row to be hanged, just to be seen alive again some time later?

Like, it gives campfire stories and western-tales! 🥹

The Cowboy

Characters: America

The Captain (England)

The Artist (France)

The Cleaner (Scotland)

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Some say there are monsters out on the plains.

Unholy things. Dangerous things. Things that no man should see, and that would drive him mad if he ever did.

The cowboy does not believe all this. He believes in truth, cold and bitter. Life is hard out here, that is true, and sometimes a hard life does things to a man. Turns him inside out with wanting and regret. Makes him yowl for his momma at night like a child from loneliness. Cold nights, bitter winds, and dust choked skies- miles and miles with nothing but the hot sun and ghosts of old lives nipping at your heels.

Because to choose a life on the plains alone is to have come from something. To go far into the desert and stay there means that there is sanctuary in the sands that cannot be found in a town, or a village. And that life changes those who live it. Makes them see their fears manifested in order to understand them. Forces them to acknowledge their wrongs and mistakes by trapping them alone.

The cowboy is no different. He’s seen many things he wishes he hadn’t. Has done many more besides.

There’d been a boy. Many summers ago.

Bright blue eyes, golden hair. Rough broad hands of a working man, but the expensive clothes of a comfortable one. He’d rolled into town with fear behind his wide smile; twitchy fingers and a need for work with no questions asked. He’d been running from things, that was clear, and the cows don’t ask no questions. Nor do cowboys in need of able hands.

He’d been good. Been quick. Great with horses, could calm even the most spooked or rowdy with just a touch. A real gift for them, and a real love for the plains. He grew tall under the wide blue skies, expanded his chest outwards as he rode in a way that made you look at him. Talked much, talked often, but without saying anything at all.

When he’d died, the cowboy didn’t know who to send for. The boy had never mentioned his father, hadn’t spoken of his momma, not even in passing. No family and not even a family name to claim him. He’d had to leave him out there to the sun, nothing but a bright red blanket over his face to offer him shade and the cowboy’s own rings on his eyes to pay for something he didn’t quite understand. It had felt right. It had felt inadequate.

He’d been too young.

The memory of the boy haunts him. The cowboy sees their final ride in his dreams, sees the herd change direction and sees the boy react too late. Sees him realise across the cattle that he was pinned- rock of the canyon on one side, and the stampede the other. He caught the cowboy’s eye and that, that moment of knowing, seared something into him that the cowboy knows he will never forget.

Over the thunder of a thousand hooves, the boy’s scream is an unanswerable battle cry he still wakes to, even now.

The cowboy keeps moving. The herds do not stop. Rides must be finished. Life goes on.

He goes it alone. Wrings out his soul in the dust, lets it boil over with regret. Then he gets another partner. Then another. The cowboy is older, too old these days to head on out to watch the cattle without someone he trusts at his back. The world is changing around them but this life does not change, does not grow easier. Only harder, as his bones begin to hurt and his eyes can no longer spot unfriendly shapes moving in the shadows.

One night and a shared fire like any other- three men and a dog in the middle of nowhere- the cowboy looks up to see a face he knows all too well. It has been years, decades, but the boy’s face is unchanged. Still milk smooth, still full and whole.

He has a chain around his neck that glitters in the firelight. Thin gold links that hold up familiar rings, unused payment for a journey not taken. He catches the cowboy’s eye over a whisper of long ago screams and nods.

There are monsters out on the plains.

Things that creep around campsites, things that stir in the night. Things that wear the faces of long dead men, that put on old skin like clothes and come to sit quietly by your side.

The cowboy cannot look at him. He hears him breathing as the men around them talk, feels the warmth of the boy’s arm through this jacket.

‘Well met,’ the cowboy manages, and offers his old friend his flask to drink from.

The boy does not take it. He looks up at the stars, bright and endless above them, and holds the cowboy’s rings in one hand.

‘Strange, isn’t it?’ he says softly, ‘What things we can sometimes think we see.’

The cowboy’s heartbeat beats loud in his ears, ‘Too much sun does things to a man.’

‘It does.’ The boy turns and looks back. His eyes are old, hard things, ‘I’ve heard people tell all sorts of tales. Drunken ghost stories no sane man would believe.’

The cowboy’s gut screams a warning, that he is but prey in front of predator. He knows to listen, has enough sense not to question, ‘I’m too sane to believe most things.’

He meets the boy’s eye and does not look away. The fire before them cracks, and the boy breathes. There is no other sound. Then, he smiles, teeth emerging white and gleaming. It doesn’t reach his eyes. Maybe, it never did.

‘Well met, friend.’ the boys says. He claps the cowboy’s shoulder and settles back. The cowboy’s chest feels lighter, ‘I think we’ll get along just fine.’

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I couldn't help myself Sunny, I was instantly inspired and it's all your fault

As it was written so quickly this may well change, but the idea wouldn't leave me alone and I had to get it out there

If this story is to have a song, it's 'Ghost Rider's' by Johnny Cash which is, and always will be, an utter banger.

Matthew: I think JFK did all that stuff for attention and also so he could have an airport named after him

Alfred: Nah man you got it wrong, he was named after the airport

could we see a tender rusame smorch bls,,,, 👉👈

I’ve never drawn something tender in my life what does that mean

quick night smoke

I've been thinking a lot lately about how the main difference between Alfred and Matt is ambition and it's relationship with faith.

Alfred wants the world. He did on some level want the industrial and economic power that propelled him to the status of power. He resisted it, but he longed for the military might that all but forced his inheritance of the slipping British Empire. He longed for it. Maybe more for the respect at first, the ability to look Arthur in the eye as a man and equal, and only reluctantly for the ability to shape the world but he wanted it all the same. And he has faith he'll have it and that he deserves it. He believes with every ounce of himself that his way, his values, his path was the best one. Not only for him but for anyone around him. First the Americas, and then the world. There are doubts that whisper in his ear that sound like the roaring flames of hell and they nag at his conscience but they disapears under the barrage of success that he desired. He is God's chosen country. Icarus flew too close to the sun, and tumbled into the sea on broken wings when sun-warmed wax melted away. But Alfred swallowed the sun itself, took it into his hands and surpassed all other nations when he became that first nuclear power. He has utter faith that the entire world will dance to the tune he chooses.

Matt has little ambition. If he has any, it is only to survive, to avoid being swallowed whole by the competing empires that gave him breath and the brother he's bound too. He was the second son of the British Empire, Arthur's most dependable child. The First Dominion of Empire. Sounds so grand, like he's so in line with Arthur. It should be that he had faith in imperial dreams, in that world upon which the sun did not set upon his family and an ambition to serve it and prop it up in all things. But there is little of it there. He is the abandoned son of the French Empire. He has no faith in loyalty or in safety or love nor in any ambition too it. Except that innate need to survive. And Matt, well he is the North. Here, survival means warmth. Not the fires of nuclear power but of warmth and community and fire. Matthew's utter devotion to his Father and his family is given without so much expectation as hope that it will be returned when the brink is near and he needs help.

Matt looks softer, kinder than his brother, but he has that same sort of sharp ambition to him under it all. It's so much smaller as he has little faith in anything he gives being returned, but his one small need demands he give anyway. The North American brothers are much the same. It's just Alfred is so much louder and less desperate and more honest than Matt.

‘I watched empires rise and fall long before the first of your kingdoms crawled out of the dirt!’

- A.D. 1842 - @historical-hetalia-week day five…

face

another quiet day in the kalmar family