Starlight (rusame)

the title was too long for wattpad to handle

The first thing States does in the crisp early morning, is that he wakes up.

That's wrong, and he can feel it, heavy and sluggish in his veins. He's in New York, and he's not allowed to sleep in New York, which means that he shouldn't have woken up at all because he never should have been unconscious.

So, the logical deduction is that he's not in New York— but that doesn't make any sense either because he feels this incorrectness of waking up in his veins and his throat, which wouldn't happen if he's not in New York. So, States is in New York City, after all.

He scrubs his face, the feeling of waking up leaving him.

One last explanation. He doesn't like it. In a perfect world, it would not be a problem.

But this isn't a perfect world, is it?

His final logical option.

He's lost time again.

The night leaves, but the fear sets in, the isolating, bone-deep chill kind. It was an eventuality, he knows, but the sensation of losing control when you don't remember it makes him afraid, really. It makes him afraid of what he does, what he is, when you peel back his restraint and– for lack of better words– his morals.

He doesn't remember how he got here, actually.

Losing time is like driving– you know you've gone from point A to point B by driving and remember it, but don't remember the roads or at all what happened. He has half the mind to check what day it is, but he remembers his phone is probably dead, and hopefully it's just dead and not, well, ruined, because he remembers dropping it in water.

States decides at this point that he hasn't lost time either, because he doesn't remember how he got from point A (conscious) to point B (waking up), but he probably needs to actually take his meds again anyway.

It's an on again off again deal with those. They keep him from hearing voices that aren't real, but also has the effect of numbing him to himself a little more than he would prefer. He's a country. He's supposed to hear some voices when he wants to, see scenes through the eyes of his people, feel the pain and joy of his nations and emotions as they rise and fall, from great depressions to great victories. It keeps him alive. It gives him empathy.

It keeps him human .

It assures him that he can still feel emotions for other people and that he still cares about things. Because it's really easy to fall into apathy when you're a manifestation of an entire country, sometimes not even consciously. He sees it in his brother, sometimes, when his eyes stare blankly ahead and when he doesn't seem to even flinch at things that happen to him. That keeps him under the radar and away from scrutiny, but also gets him criticism if or when people realise something is horribly wrong, take, that moment in June (2021) when the bones of Indigenous children were found buried in unmarked graves. Sometimes, States thinks he doesn't know his brother as well as he should. He digresses.

If you were to ask States to pick a time that his grip on reality began to loosen, he would have three candidates. The first, would be his Civil War. Splitting in half and exchanging eyeballs, seeing through each other's eyes (the metaphorical becomes quite literal when you are a nation) with the full knowledge that they are physical interpretations of the exact same person is unsettling, to say the very least . The nation has only one soul. It's not typical for one soul to be in two bodies, he thinks. So, that's option number one, and the earliest he's willing to backtrack to.

Option number two is the development of modern warfare beginning at the tail end of the first World War and going through the second. None of them came out of that undamaged. In fact, they were all quite a lot more damaged than they were before, irreparably. States now realises that his tolerance to the whispers probably is what helped him through the recovery, personally. A little bit of insanity is required as a country. Seeing things differently from a regular citizen is quite given, but trading your sanity for power is a dangerous game.