#ameprus

That was how Alfred had ended up in a German town the name of which took up three signposts at the train station and which Alfred couldn’t even try to pronounce even though his German had been polished to a shine since 1942.

Thanks to his willingness to play fast and loose with his security clearance, he’d even managed to sneak in a carboy of homemade moonshine. To that point, Alfred had only seen Gilbert truly astonished once in his life, back in Pennsylvania in 1778, when Gilbert realized exactly how little military training Alfred had under his belt. But here he was, wearing the same expression a quarter of a millennium later when Alfred told him the proof of the bootleg he’d smuggled into Gilbert’s country. Unlike last time, the expression almost instantly gave way to a Cheshire grin.

That was how they’d ended up here, in an abandoned field (”It used to grow wheat, I think. Or barley? Jesus, I can’t remember, I just remember whenever I came here it smelled like beer, it was the best,” Gilbert had said) outside an abandoned, half-bombed out castle, growing increasingly more drunk while Gilbert consulted rotting blueprints and directed Alfred on all the heavy lifting.

Truly, Alfred didn’t mind doing the heavy lifting. It was difficult for him to find a challenging workout, so lifting several hundred kilo’s worth of timber into a mathematically precise angle was exactly the sort of physical exertion he found thrilling. He only wished Gilbert wasn’t quite so eager to become his foreman.

“Is the bullhorn really necessary?” He shouted back at Gilbert, who was hunched over the camp table they’d set up just outside the overgrown ruins of the castle. Gilbert squinted up at him through the sun and raised the bullhorn to his lips before clicking it on.

“Ja.” Alfred opened his mouth to retort, but Gilbert continued, “It needs more counterweight; I want to be able to launch your fat ass when we’re done.”

“Oh, fuck you!” Alfred laughed, hauling more small boulders over anyway.

By the afternoon of the second day, the trebuchet itself was assembled and ready to fire. Gilbert was lounging in the shade on account of his absolutely blindingly pale complexion, watching from a camp chair while Alfred, shirtless, sweating, with a wet towel under his ball cap and prescription aviators replacing his normal specs, was dragging the finished siege weapon into the position that Gilbert deemed correct.

They were also both—particularly Gilbert—fairly drunk.

“Schön!“ Gilbert slurred eventually, and at long last, set aside the bullhorn. “Come chug this before you pass out,” he lifted a full gallon of water and set it on the table.

“Oh come on, I’m not that bad off,” Alfred said, and he really did mean it. He still marched over and popped the cap anyway, giving it a grateful chug before setting it aside and taking a swig of the drink he’d left on Gilbert’s makeshift foreman’s desk. Ice still rattled inside the YETI. Alfred wasn’t even winded.

“You’re really disgusting, you know that?” Gilbert said, looking up at him like a skinny, drunk, middle-aged divorcee, sitting in his camp chair, bucket hat and sunglasses in place with legs crossed and every available inch of skin slathered in sunscreen. Alfred beamed at him.

“Jealous?”

“Fick dich,” Gilbert spat back, nursing his drink through a straw.

“I’ll pass.” Alfred took another sip and looked back at their trebuchet. It had turned out shockingly good for a two-day effort, far better than Alfred had anticipated they’d be able to manage.

“So, scale of one to ten, how historically accurate is it?” he asked. Gilbert scoffed.

“Historically accurate? Pah!” He took another long suck on the hot pink bendy straw, and mumbled around it, “if we were being historically accurate we’d be firing buckets of Greek fire.” His entire body paused, eyebrows raising far above his outdated sunglasses. “You know,” he said, dangerously.

“Absolutely not,” Alfred cut him off, for some reason putting himself between Gilbert and the siege weapon as if the older nation would leap to arm it at that very moment, “your brother will kill both of us.”

“Pffft,” Gilbert waved him off, “that baby? He’s even younger than you, and you’re a fucking infant.”

“Hey.”

“Seriously, though, I have a recipe somewhere in the cellar. It’s in Latin, I think.” Gilbert stood unsteadily from his seat, leaning on the camp table a moment and shaking out his right foot, which had gone numb crossed over his left leg. “Can you read Roman? Mein eyes gone wobbly.”

“Okay,” Alfred said, calmly moving the double-walled growler further away from Gilbert’s hand, “I think that’s enough moonshine for you.”

“What? Please! I’m fine. I remember this tomorrow. Besides,” he straightened and turned to look back at the complete part of the castle where they’d been camping, “eye wobbles making Greek fire more prettier, now helping walk you me, useless schlingel.”

“You realize that’s not proper English,” Alfred said, not moving to help him.

“You understood, no?” Gilbert took a ambitious step forward toward the castle.

“Jesus,” Alfred caught him and turned him around, effectively holding him up with one hand, “we are not making Greek fire, but you can pick out your favorite boulder, come on.”

Gilbert let himself be all but dragged out to the field, and was staring with a disgusted expression at Alfred’s bicep, which flexed under Gilbert’s weight.

“Mein gott,” he poked the muscle experimentally, “you were a twig yesterday, what happened?”

“I can’t believe I had a crush on you,” Alfred griped under his breath, and Gilbert strained to hear him.

“Wie bitte?”

“Nothing,” Alfred said, laughing when Gilbert tripped over a rock and made an undignified noise. It was at this point that Gilbert shook the American off and continued under his own power, which, much to Alfred’s surprise, he seemed to manage with passable results. After much pondering, Gilbert picked out a rock and pointed to it. Alfred hefted it with minimal effort and carried it over to the sling. As the American was fastening it in place, he realized that, given the weight of the rock and the counterweight he’d measured out himself, the rock was liable to land not in the field, but somewhere in the castle itself—the ruined portion, at most, but still.

“Uhh, Gil,” He said, “Are you—I mean, this is going to hit the castle, you know that, right?”

“Of fucking course it is! Your lot bombed it out, so why can’t I use it as target practice? Get moving! Let’s knock some shit down.”

It was not at all what Alfred was expecting, but he shrugged shoulders and finished rigging up the boulder and drawing back the trebuchet to full tension. He brought the trigger lead over to Gilbert.

“If you’ll do the honors,” He said, giving a silly mock bow, because while he wasn’t as plastered as Gilbert, he was still playfully drunk. “As the ancient history expert here.”

“Ancient—you fucking, give it.” He took it and yanked, and both nations’ heads tracked the slow, freight-train arc of the machine before the sling whipped open and threw the boulder across the field with impossible ease, before it crashed into one of the lone standing walls of the castle, knocking off a car door’s worth of bricks to the ground.

“YEAH!!” Both of them cheered, too thrilled with the act of scientifically correct destruction to worry about the fact that it was Gilbert’s own property. “Fuck yeah, it works!” Alfred cheered, grinning his blinding, all-American grin seeing his handiwork succeed on the first trial.

“I love the smell of destruction in the morning!” Gilbert said. It was late afternoon. “Ha!” With zero preamble, he grabbed Alfred’s face and pulled him down for a drunken kiss, right on the lips.

“Jesus Christ,” Alfred said, pulling away, “How much have you—you taste like a fucking distillery,” Alfred actually involuntarily gagged, “Gil, seriously, it’s too hot out here—drink some fucking water—”

“Right, test one ist gut,” the Prussian spread his arms in victory, grinning like a madman, “time for test zwei,” he ignored Alfred and squinted, grinning, at the dust cloud left by their missile. “Mitkommen,” He declared, waving Alfred on as he marched back towards their camp table, “this time, Greek fire!”

“Oh my—Gilbert, Jesus, fuck,” Alfred tripped over uneven ground in his haste to follow. He was drunker than he’d like to admit. Ludwig really is going to kill both of us. “Gilbert, no.”