You're Too Old to Lose It, Too Young to Choose It, a FrUK fic

Characters/Pairings: FrUK, France/England/France
Rating: T
Warnings: human AU and names, NSFW oral (non-explicit, really), drunkenness, overuse of parenthesis

Synopsis: Feeling nostalgic for the punk rock persona of his youth, Arthur has been going to a weekly punk show at a club near home for two months. Each week he meets up with the same man. He's French and charming; they talk over the music, buy each other drinks, and screw in the alley behind the club. But it’s fine as long as they don’t talk about real life or exchange names. Right? It's nothing.

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You're Too Old to Lose It, Too Young to Choose It
by crashedtimemachine

London, 2000

(He shows up every weekend, clad in leather and chains, a piercing through his nose and a chip on his shoulder. He drinks, he smokes, he thrashes with the rest of them. Punk rock may be dead, but it's alive and well in this shabby club in Hackney.)

The gritty cement is littered with all manner of discarded detritus. It's also uncomfortably damp; Arthur vaguely remembers that it had started drizzling just before the show was supposed to start.

This should concern him; the worn out knees of his ripped up jeans are hardly proper protection from the elements, much less the pebbled glass that crunches and grinds under his bony knees.

In point of fact, it doesn't bother him at all.

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The Eternal Note of Sadness, a FrUK fic

Characters/Pairings: light FrUK, France, England, Charles II
Rating: T
Warnings: emotional hurt comfort, implied madness, melancholy, history

Synopsis: Calais, 1651 - Having fled his land with his king to escape Cromwell's power-grab, England finds himself adrift and longing to return. He stays in Calais where the channel is narrowest and he can still see the White Cliffs of Dover -- home -- just across the sea.

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The Eternal Note of Sadness
by crashedtimemachine

Calais, France, November 1651

Arthur—England—Arthur kicked a pebble, then glared at it as if his foul mood were somehow it's fault.

The sea breeze whipped birds-nest tangles into his already unkempt hair; blond wisps of it kept trying to block out his vision of the white cliff faces that stood opposite the shoreline in stark relief against the horizon.

He crossed his arms over his chest, stuffed his hands under his armpits to keep them warm, and turned his back against the cutting November wind blowing in from the sea. It was doing him no good brooding over what could not be changed, no matter how frustrated—how powerless—it left him feeling. For who knew how long they were to be trapped in that God forsaken country (though everyone knew God was no longer with Britain, either, if truth be told and England was honest with himself.)
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