Chapter Text
Arthur wasn’t entirely certain why he’d invited Alfred to stay with him for this particular summit. It wasn’t one of the larger international meetings that their bosses forced them to hold, in the vainly superstitious hope that increased cooperation between them would trickle-down and ease negotiations over whatever current diplomatic agreement they were hoping to achieve. It might have been a climate summit. It might have been a global health summit. Regardless, he’d sent the text offering Alfred a place to stay right before the meeting ended.
Around him paper rustled and low voices surged toward a roar as his peers gathered their papers into briefcases and made toward the exit. Arthur didn’t bother to move, tapping his fingers against the arm of his chair as he waited for a response from Alfred.
Ellipses popped up across the bottom of his screen. Stopped. Started again. After about thirty seconds spent staring at his phone and waiting for the message to come through, Alfred finally decided on a response.
‘Sorry.’
Arthur waited. Alfred wasn’t done—he never sent just one text. It was like the boy didn’t remember they’d been paying by the message a scant few years before. It wasn’t often that he was jealous of Alfred’s apparent youth, but he’d begun to wonder whether there was something advantageous in having the elastic brain of a perpetual teenager.
‘Already got a hotel with Mattie.’
Arthur stared at his phone. Thought about what he should say. Stuffed what he felt he should say back under a rock in a dank corner of his mind where everything else concerning Alfred languished. Carefully tapped out a message with his index finger using the keyboard on the screen. All one message, kept brief to skirt under character limits that didn’t matter anymore.
‘No worries, lad. Thought I should offer. Have a good night.’
He slid his phone back into the pocket of his suit-jacket and followed Jack and Matthew, who were buried deep in conversation over some sort of conservation effort, or perhaps bears in general, toward the exit. He didn’t bother attempting to insert himself into the conversation, just letting their words sweep over him and past him, buoying him out of the room on a tide of his children’s voices.
Somewhere behind him, Francis had been caught up in a furious debate with Germany over EU banking measures. He’d have no company for dinner, then. It was a good thing he’d been planning on going home after this. The day was wet and gloomy, and Francis was always in a mood after these meetings. And Arthur didn’t quite feel like defending his weather (as if he had anything to do with it) from his—partner. None of his brothers were staying with him at the moment. He might as well get takeaway, there’d be no point in using the stove tonight.
As the doors swung closed behind him, Arthur’s phone buzzed. He slipped it out just enough to turn it on, and glanced at it. A fat raindrop landed on the screen, and he swiped it away so he could see the notification.
‘Alfred F. Jones (USA) left a 👍’
Arthur Kirkland’s house was half storage-rooms. He was lucky enough to have kept his house outside London, sitting a few dozen kilometers to the east and at least a ten minute drive to the M40, and to have thought to keep a house large enough for his packrat’s collection of a millennium and a half of life. Give or take a few centuries. It was also the right size for the proper number of guest-rooms that he could host his brothers and the few Commonwealth nations that might want to see him for holidays. Once every decade or so.
Still, his things were all he shared the house with, and thus the major consideration. Rhys had moved out just before the turn of the millennium, and he’d taken Piran with him when he went. He’d said that over seven hundred years of cohabitation with his littlest brother had been enough, and that he’d needed space. This didn’t stop him from visiting at least once every other week. If not more often. Seven hundred years of cohabitation made for a difficult set of habits to break. If Wales were to ever become fully independent, Arthur was certain he’d still be waking up in the middle of the night to Rhys riffling through his fridge after a night out.
Arthur pulled into the garage, and squeezed out into the narrow space between the car door and the wall. The house hadn’t been built with automobiles in mind, and it was rather obvious in the dimensions of the space he’d had retrofitted for parking. The bag holding his takeaway dragged against the car, rending the thin plastic with ugly stretch-marks, and Arthur huffed as he finally got to the door and fumbled for his keys.
Perhaps he should have eaten dinner at the pub instead.
He could really use a drink.
It was the whole reason he’d initially indulged in renting a London flat after all. So he’d have a place to crash after late nights in the pub when the government was particularly difficult, though he’d found that it was swiftly becoming where he spent most of his time. The company which occasionally snuck across the Channel into his bed made for a convincing argument for him to stay.
But even after a thousand years, if you caught him on a truly bad day, he’d shy away from London as the sharp edge of his territory and hole himself up in his manor house closer to the center of old Wessex. Today, while not truly a bad day, had left him with a desire to be out of the city where his sons were staying. Abandoning his modern heart for an older one.
If only when his memory conjured the specter of one Alfred, it would do so without reminding him of another. The entanglement of father and son. And him, there in the middle, having been both. No longer either.
Arthur shoved his food into the fridge and made his way upstairs.
The bitter chain of association keeping him prisoner in his own past led him to stand in what he liked to pretend was an unused guest-room. Never mind that it had only been used by one guest, and that his brothers avoided it like the plague. Or the fact that the decor and furnishings hadn’t been changed in near two hundred and forty years.
The room was clean. It was always clean, though Arthur wasn’t sure how. He’d never brought a duster in, and well—with Rhys and Piran gone, he was absolutely certain they never bothered to contribute to his chores when visiting. They’d barely bothered when living with him. Arthur crossed the room to a heavy-set dark dresser. While his own tastes ran a smidgen more elaborate, he’d chosen to leave most of the furniture here as practical and durable as possible. Alfred always had such prodigious strength, even at his sickliest.
Much of Arthur’s house was covered in art. He’d been certain to have paintings done of as often as he could throughout his life. Not for any particular desire to see himself. In fact, if there were any indictment to be made against the practice of hanging one’s own portraits, it was the creeping disgust of catching himself at any angle while walking through the halls of his home—he’d stopped wearing a dressing gown long before it fell out of fashion, simply because he’d spotted his own specter floating across the hall one night when he’d stumbled out of bed to take a piss. He’d fallen out of the habit of getting new portraits done over the years, choosing to let it go as photography entered vogue—but he still itched over that decision.
Humanity quite enjoyed preserving art. Often more than they enjoyed preserving themselves. With enough paintings, his mark might be undeniable. And the world would know how to put together his body, if he were ever called back after his last citizen no longer considered themselves English. Endings were never so clean-cut for nations as they were for humans, and his paintings were the closest thing he’d get to a grave-bell.
Arthur grimaced, and looked up at the only two paintings in the room.
The paintings hadn’t been done too far apart—in fact, they were done in the same year, in the same month, and with one notable exception, they made up the entirety of Arthur’s evidence that Alfred had once been small enough to fit nicely in his arms. He didn’t think about his notable exception often, despite the fact that the copper frame of it warms his skin even now, the once ruddy color now America’s iconic French-given green-teal. Protective patina, a chemist had once explained to him, when Arthur had nearly made the error of asking it to be cleaned. It appeared that metal scarred too.
It was rather a struck of genius luck that had ensured that Alfred was not the sole occupant of these paintings. Indeed, the only time these paintings had ever been outside this room had been shortly after Matthew had come to stay with him, and he’d needed to reassure the boy that though his… ‘Papa’ was no longer his primary caretaker, the man who held that role was no stranger.
Alfred himself helped as well, of course, until he—well. It didn’t take long until the paintings were moved back into this room and it was sealed off for a near century. Matthew enjoyed them while he had them, and while he’d respected the lock, Arthur had caught him with his palm against the door and a wistful look on his face more than once over the intervening centuries. Arthur was certain that same wistful expression could be seen painted across his own features now.
Well. There was no one else in the house tonight. He might as well indulge himself in the nostalgia that had him reaching out to Alfred during the meeting in the first place. In the morning he’d go and see them—Matthew, Jack, and Alfred if he was feeling particularly masochistic—off at the airport. Then he’d discuss with Francis whether he could expect company for a few more days—or perhaps he would drive the man back across the channel.
But for now, this house was a bitter man’s glass, half-full of memories.
And Arthur could still use a drink.