yep @ludbeilschmidt wrote it it’s here

In Feliciano’s opinion, hiking meant walking into nature at a nice slow pace until he found a pretty view, and then sitting and enjoying it until it got dark or he got cold or tired or bored. Apparently it meant something different and much more exercise-y to Ludwig, and Feliciano thought he should have maybe thought of that before he agreed to go hiking. To Ludwig, hiking meant waking up at godawful hours—like, before eight—and then walking mostly uphill and carrying heavy backpacks (at least they were heavy from the food) and being convinced that this was fun. Feliciano was sure Ludwig had got this from Gilbert.

They’d already passed at least four perfectly nice places to sit down and eat lunch. This was too much.

“Lud, where are we even going?”

“Up to the waterfall. It’s not that far.”

Feliciano rolled his eyes.

“Really, it’s not. Look,” Ludwig said, pulling the trail map from his backpack. “We’re here—” he tapped a spot on the blue trail “—and we’re just going up here.”

Well, of course it would look easy on the map, and it would seem easy for Ludwig with his exercising and his stupid attractive muscly legs. “All right, but can we take a break?” 

“Do you need one?”

Feliciano shrugged. “We can either have a break now or you can carry me the rest of the way when I faint from hunger in fifteen minutes.”

Ludwig handed him a protein bar. “It won’t even take fifteen minutes to get there.”

It took twelve. Ludwig refused to carry Feliciano, but did take his backpack; and after they’d finished with their lunch Feliciano sat back and looked at Ludwig and the sky and the slant of the waterfall and decided that even if he had had to get up so early for it the view was wonderful.

“Wait,” Ludwig said, looking up from his torte. “Mr. Edelstein, if you’re conducting a showcase of famous Austrian composers, why is Beethoven in it?”

It had all been going so well. Feliciano buried his lower face in his hands. His mother was making that face she made when she was trying really hard not to laugh, and everything had been going so well, and now this. He’d told Ludwig, my parents can be a little weird and mom might say some embarrassing things, and he’d even thought, do I need to tell him about dad’s music opinions?, and decided not to, and now this.

“Beethoven is an Austrian composer,” Roderich replied, delicately setting down his fork.

“Wasn’t he born in Bonn?”

Feliciano made a quick shut-up-now gesture at Ludwig, who either didn’t see it or didn’t know what was coming.

“That means absolutely nothing; he may have been born in Germany but he lived, composed, and died in Vienna. Beethoven was Austrian in any sense that matters, young man.”

Erzsébet actually snorted. Feliciano gave her a despairing look; Roderich’s own facial expression clearly said back me up, dear.

Ludwig frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. He was born in Germany, he was German.”

“You come into my house, on the day of Chopin’s funeral—”

that rule is “no requesting anything pairing austria or hungary with germany or italy”, not “no requesting anything with austria, hungary, germany, or italy”

One of those ghost-hunting TV shows had come to Ludwig’s apartment building shortly after he moved in. It was called Extreme Ghost Finders, featuring Alfred Jones and Ivan Braginsky, and that episode had set their show’s record for Most Ghosts Found In A Single Residential Building. Ludwig had seriously considered moving out after that, deposit be damned—not that he actually believed the episode or anything. Neither Jones nor Braginsky seemed anywhere near trustworthy. There was obviously some kind of rational, non-ghost explanation for those phenomena, and the fact that one hadn’t been found yet didn’t mean anything, it just hadn’t been found yet.

By the third time in five minutes that Ludwig found his coffee beans knocked off the counter despite them having been nowhere near the edge, however, some part of his mind was insisting that Jones and Braginsky might have had a point.

He set the beans back on the counter, and then put a cookbook on top of them for good measure and ignored the nagging memories of all the movies—Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror, even the goddamned Haunted Mansion—which insisted that any moment now a dead body would fall out of the cupboard, or the walls would start bleeding. With some effort, Ludwig turned back to the omelet in the pan.

There was a bang.

Ludwig took a deep breath and turned around very slowly, spatula at the ready.

The bag was ripped open, coffee beans and bits of grounds scattered across the floor. Before his eyes, writing appeared in the pile.

Ludwig blinked.

ｈｉ!

Ludwig bit their nails; it was a habit they’d had as long as they could remember, and had never managed to break. Mostly they wore gloves to deal with it, avoiding Gilbert’s suggestions to cover their fingers with chili powder and well-meaning but ineffectual advice about reducing stress. It had gotten somewhat better, recently, but their nails were still cut almost to the quick.

Feli’s advice was “paint your nails!”

Ludwig gave him a skeptical look. “There’s not enough here to paint.”

Feli sat up a little straighter from where he was half-tucked into Ludwig’s side and half-draped across their lap and grabbed Ludwig’s nearest hand. “You’ve still got nails, though, so there’s enough.” He paused, though he did not release Ludwig’s hand. “I mean, if you don’t want to…”

“I don’t mind, I just don’t think it would. Well. Work.”

“Ah, it will,” Feli chirped. “I’ll just have to be careful!”

“I just—I, is this legal.”

Veneziano shrugged. “It’s not like we’re stealing Kugelmugel or anything, it’s just, I don’t know, extended babysitting?”

“It’s not babysitting,” Kugelmugel snapped, “because I’m not a baby. I’m thirty-two.”

“Okay, extended micronation-sitting.” Veneziano’s facial expression suggested that he thought watching Kugelmugel was, very definitely, still under the purview of babysitting.

“I don’t know,” Germany said. “They are technically Austria’s dependent, so if we take them out somewhere without asking him first it might count as…territory-stealing?”

“My independence is more than just an art form, you know,” Kugelmugel sniffed. “I’m not his territory.”

“Tell him, kid,” Veneziano said, grinning. “You wanna go to an art museum and make fun of post-minimalists?”

Kugelmugel nodded fiercely, and Germany decided that whatever clean-up he might have to do with Austria after this would definitely be less than the time Veneziano’s idea of babysitting Kugelmugel had involved a repeat of the great mustaches-on-all-Austria’s-paintings event of 1802.

thank u! hug scarcity is a real disease and the only cure is feliciano giotto costa vargas

The first time was for pneumonia. Mr. F. C. Vargas came in looking utterly miserable, and left with a prescription for azithromycin that he could get filled on the way out and very stern instructions from Ludwig to not return to work at his brother’s restaurant for a week and a half and get as much rest as possible.

The second time was for muscle pain. Mr. F. C. Vargas had apparently played a game of soccer far too vigorously. Ludwig prescribed Naproxin and wrote up a quick regimen of stretches, which his patient groaned at but took. He even managed, with a tiny bit of guidance, to do a couple of the easier ones in the examination room, though Ludwig had to hold him up.

The third time was for a migraine. Mr. F. C. “Call me Feliciano, we know each other now” Vargas asked if he could also have a hug, because aside from the Fioricet he would also have to lie down in a dark room and not look at anything and that was boring.

Hugs were not prescribed. Mr. — Mr. Feliciano Vargas looked quite disappointed as he left. Ludwig wondered if, since physical contact and interaction with other humans was important, maybe in the future a quick hug would count as secondary treatment. The people at the pharmacy probably wouldn’t enjoy it.

The fourth time was for a cold. Feliciano Vargas came in and should have left after five minutes, since it was nothing that couldn’t be taken care of with some soup and cold medicine, which he should have had at home. Feliciano Vargas did not leave after five minutes, instead asking Ludwig about the dogs in the picture he’d seen in Ludwig’s office as he walked to the examination room. For reasons Ludwig did not entirely understand, he told Feliciano Vargas about his dogs; for reasons Ludwig did not understand at all, Feliciano Vargas was giving him a look he didn’t think he’d ever been on the receiving end of before; for reasons Ludwig didn’t want to think about, something very buried within his chest fluttered the tiniest bit.

Feliciano left with Ludwig’s aunt Erzsébet’s recipe for halászlé (“It’s very, very spicy, so be careful, but it will clear out your sinuses. …And remember to eat lots of citrus and take a decongestant.”)

The fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth times—well, the halászlé had worked, because the things Feliciano brought up—my ankle hurts, my chest hurts, I think I had a palpitation—were…frankly, trivial. Ludwig asked him several times whether he was sure coming to the doctor for this was a wise idea, insurance being what it was, and Feliciano had waved his hands and said that coming to see Dr. Ludwig (“Dr. Beilschmidt”, Ludwig would always say, with less and less conviction) was always a good idea.

Ludwig approved of caution.

He did not approve of how, after Ludwig would tell Feliciano he was perfectly healthy, Feliciano would say in what Ludwig hoped was a joking manner (did he?) that he was suffering from inopia amplexūm. Hug scarcity. Which, Feliciano claimed, was contagious. And Ludwig might have caught it.

Ludwig did not have inopia amplexūm, because that wasn’t a thing, Feliciano.

Ludwig also did not have inopia amplexūm, because Feliciano hugged him. 

The ninth time, Feliciano came into the examination room and said he had something serious. Light-headedness. Inability to concentrate. Heart palpitations. Occasional hot flashes.

Ludwig swallowed. “That—may be contagious. I have experienced one or two of those symptoms recently; I am not sure what it is but it may be for the best if you take a day of bed rest—”

Feliciano cut him off. “Well, I do know what it is. I came so I could tell you, in case you had it also.” He slid off the exam table, grabbing at the back of his paper gown so that it wouldn’t come undone. Around two seconds before Feliciano laid a hand on Ludwig’s chest just under his shoulder, Ludwig realized what was coming. (Heart palpitation, hot flash, face reddening—)

Feliciano smiled, breath almost like he was about to laugh. “Lovesickness?”

Feliciano Vargas left with a prescription for Afghani food for two at seven, and possibly a movie afterwards depending on the success of the first round of treatment.

The thing is that Feliciano always takes out his hearing aids the second he gets home. They’re not comfortable, he says; he doesn’t like the feeling of having things inside his ears and the sound he gets out of them is still a little garbled and he doesn’t see the point of them when it’s just him and Ludwig anyway. And the other thing is that the first time Ludwig had tried to talk to Feliciano while he was painting he’d tapped Feliciano on the shoulder and Feliciano had shrieked and accidentally given a cat one big yellow stripe and then signed “Don’t sneak up on me when I’m concentrating you almost gave me a heart attack!” in such huge gestures it was a little tough for Ludwig to even understand.

Trying to just move into Feliciano’s line of vision doesn’t work because he’s staring so hard at the canvas or drawing pad or whatever he’s working with. While Ludwig…is fond of how Feliciano is when he’s focused like that, sometimes there are questions to be answered, like do you know where the keys went.

What Lovino does is flash the light on and off; Feliciano’s grandfather is much less—principled? bothered?—than Ludwig about getting between Feliciano and whatever he’s staring at; touching Feliciano on the hand or lower arm or some part of himself he can see works sometimes but sometimes gets the jumping and smeared paint. 

Feliciano had finally told him, after a while, that what some of his friends did was stamp as soon as they’d come into the room, just like knocking except he could actually tell it was going on.

It always feels a little rude, is the problem. But it gets Feliciano’s attention as long as his feet are on the floor and he’d said it was a thing; so Ludwig stands in the doorway of the tiny studio and firmly stomps his foot twice. Feliciano perks up and sets down the pastels he’s working with, turning towards him.

“Yeah?”

“We’re running low on chocolate for the Advent calendar.”

At least Feliciano looks a little contrite about it, pulling the next signs in closer to his body. “I might have got just a bit carried away?”

“You ate up to the twenty-third.”

“…Maybe if you didn’t get such nice chocolates I wouldn’t eat them.”

“Do you want me to get you a personal bag next time I buy groceries?”

Feliciano shakes his head. “Stealing them when you’re not looking is about three-quarters of the fun.”

Ludwig rolls his eyes. “The other quarter?”

“Stealing when you are looking.”

Germany simply freezes up.

Underneath him, Veneziano stares to his left and blurts out “Grandpa?” in a voice that definitely heralds crying very soon, and then the second “Grandpa!” means at least part of it will be happy crying, and the third “Grandpa!” means what Germany really, really, really wants to say right now if his throat would unstick, which is what the fuck.

Rome, leaning against the closet door in a way that suggests he thinks he’s far taller than he is, waves at them both.

Very gingerly, Germany pulls out of Veneziano, grabs a pillow, and covers what’s necessary with it. He wonders if he should maybe cover Veneziano with something. He wonders how fast he could get his underwear back on before jumping out of the window.

Veneziano does start to cry, and Germany pats his back—he’s not up to anything more effective than that right now. “Grandpa! I missed you so much would you get out of the room please or maybe just not look until Germany’s not going to die or me either how’s Hellas and everyone is it still nice in Heaven did you have to beat up God again to come down here ‘cause the Vatican’s gonna be angry no seriously please look at the wall I think Germany might have swallowed his tongue or something when you showed up I know I almost did.” Veneziano takes a huge breath and then turns to Germany. “You okay?”

Germany nods, which is a lie. Rome—who at least has closed his eyes—says “They’re fine, yes, yes, and too bad for him. I’ll tell you everything once your fine young man there isn’t dying.”

He kind of wants to say something at the ‘fine young man’, or at the way Rome said it, and then Rome adds “And I’ve also got a couple pointers on technique he might appreciate” and Veneziano yells “Grandpa!” and Germany decides that for all the problems with Germania at least he knocks.