GerIta

Chapter 8: That One Postcard Chapter

Me: *Points to title* "That one Swedish chapter had Sweden in it, and now this one has postcards. Pretty self-explanatory, yeah?" *Frowns, glances around* "So then why am I explaining it to you?...Well, don't look at me! The one thing I can't explain is how my brain works. P.S. I made the covers for all of these Hetalia fanfics from scratch. Like, yeah, I got the flag designs off the internet, but then I had to put it all together in Microsoft paint. It took forever..." *Pouts* "so tell me how good they are."

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The whole next day at work, Ludwig's stomach hurt. He felt sick. He couldn't decide if it had started immediately this morning, after he had realized Feli had not seemed overly pleased with him at the end of their date last night, or if it had begun later, when he had opened the mailbox expectantly and found no rose-colored envelope in it. Either way, he was a mess. He was jumpy and snappish—he shouted at Herr Oxenstierna even when he had done nothing wrong—and he was utterly useless, making typos on his paperwork all day.

By lunch time, he had half convinced himself that it would be more productive if he went home and stayed there.

Herr Oxenstierna called him, then, on the landline, and he was startled by the phone, figuring his secretary had already gone out on his lunch break. "What?" he asked into the receiver with a sigh, wiping his miserable face with his free hand. He had also been nervously sweating all day as if there was anything to be nervous about—he had already screwed everything up with his Italian, on the first date no less, and he was hopeless.

"There's a Mr. Vargas here to see you," Herr Oxenstierna grunted with just enough of a sing-song tone to his voice to indicate that he was mocking Ludwig, which, really, Ludwig couldn't've cared less about just at that moment.

"What?" he asked again into the receiver, holding the phone with infinitely more interest to his face. It vaguely occurred to him that this was the attention he should've been paying to his work all day.

But his secretary simply hung up on him, and it didn't even matter anyway because he looked up and Feliciano was already seeing himself through the glass doors to his office while Herr Oxenstierna fiddled with some papers on his desk, ignoring the opportunity to brazenly gawk at his boss' rendezvous. Actually, 'rendezvous' implied something arranged about the whole thing that did not exist at all.

Feliciano was wearing some fashionable number or other with a military style jacket that was clearly meant more for the runway than the field, and he had some Tupperware with him. (Me: "Microsoft Word would appear to have capitalized 'Tupperware' because it must be a brand--like how everybody says Kleenex in the US, but they're actually facial tissues? Did you know that Popsicle is a brand? Yeah, mind=blown.") He came around to the other side of Ludwig's desk—while Ludwig was still busy gaping at him, completely at a loss—pushed some papers aside, and sat on it. He set the Tupperware down beside him and started straightening the lapels on Ludwig's suit jacket like it was the most natural thing in the world. "I had some time," he explained, "so I asked your brother where you work and made you lunch. Also, I'll be done with daily mass on Thursday, so I figured we could have our second date on Friday."

It seemed to Ludwig, then, that he magically produced a rose-colored envelope between his fingers, flicked it once or twice in front of his face, set it down on top of the Tupperware, pressed a chaste kiss into Ludwig's cheek, and left. If Herr Oxenstierna came in right then and told him he had hallucinated the whole thing, he would've believed him, except the Tupperware and the envelope were still there when he recalled how to blink again.