12. Pumpkin, Wales, Scotland, England + Sealand, 350 words
1968
“He looks like England did when he was little,” Wales murmurs, “don’t you think? The same big eyes, just a different colour.”
“It’s the big mouth ganning with them ye’ve got to worry about,” Scotland mutters back to him.
The both of them stand side by side in the main drawing room, watching England - as they have been for the past half hour at least - bounce the newest little surprise ‘addition’ to their family on his knee with the charmed smile of an empty-nester in deep denial. Sloughing off the empire as they are, and with North throwing an almighty teenage strop, Wales would have thought the last thing any of them needed would be another child Nation - micronation? Jesus - unceremoniously deposited into their care, but radio pirates had apparently seized one of the old WW2 offshore platform forts and declared it a principality - and then promptly panicked when a tiny immortal toddler had popped up in their cabin.
The humans had called the boy Peter before handing him off to British authorities. Something to do with how the boy had fallen straight off the platform and drowned before they’d been able to fish him out of the water, and so he’d been, to them, the boy who’d never grow up.
‘Peter’ had, of course, promptly woke up half an hour later, none the worse for wear and with very little recollection about being dead - the blessings of youth -, and so now the British Nations have the delight of figuring out what to do with their new… brother? Nephew? Relation. Called Sealand.
“He’s not even a landmass,” Wales frets.
England is already attached. England is already planning on airing out the old nurseries for Sealand, bouncing the currently very happy little boy on his knee and teaching him fairytales and nursery rhymes.
“Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,
Had a wife but couldn’t keep her.
He put her in a pumpkin shell,
And there he kept her very well!”
“What’s a pumpkin?” Sealand asks, big blue eyes innocently curious.
Beside Wales, Scotland groans. “He’s ganning to have to cook one, isn’t he?”
* The Principality of Sealand * North = Northern Ireland, and ‘the almighty teenage strop’ is, of course, a reference to the beginning of the Troubles. Obviously, at a later time, Wales would probably describe North’s reaction a little differently, but, at the time this fic is set, things in Northern Ireland haven’t gotten anywhere near as bad as they will get.
