It was an accident

12

America stared out at the village before her. The scene had changed, but America could still see the group of blondes in the wooded valley below, the image refusing to leave her mind. 

The Nordics.

Were they the people she kept seeing in her dreams? The five faces -- recognizable but not at the same time--too blurred and warped to make out. Had she really met them as a child? She didn't remember meeting them, though that didn't really mean a lot for a memory of this age. 

In a way, this wasn't entirely groundbreaking information to her; she had known for a long time that there was a gap in her memory from back when she was a child. All this time, she had thought the gap had only swallowed the memories surrounding whatever happened to give her the nasty scar that stained the skin above her right eye. Now she wasn't so sure. What else had happened that she was forgetting? It must have had something to do with the Nordics, if the scenes being shown were her true memories.

She had tried to remember before, after her dreams had given her what she assumed to be a peek into the past, but the visions were never clear nor long enough to give her much to work with. A few times, she had even tried to paint the images in her dreams, but they were even less clear on canvas than they were in her mind, and focusing on the pseudo-memories had only ever resulted in headaches.

Fixing her eyes on a dark gray rock that laid near her feet, she decided to try to remember -- one last time. If it gave her another migraine then so be it, she was already in her own personal hell, so it's not like it would matter. She zoned out, staring at that lone rock, focusing her thoughts to go back to when she was a child, before the Mexico twins had been born. Going through memories chronologically, she finally got to the block of time that she could never recall. America focused on that gap, turning all of her attention to it as she tried to remember.

It was discouragingly black in her mind's eye, but she didn't stop, she had to remember. She began to get that familiar pain, that sharp, stabbing feeling in the sides of her head. The pain grew, but America was stubborn; she kept focusing, she was going to remember this time, she had to, she just knew it. She used the image of the Nordics at the bottom of the valley as a starting point, trying to force her memories to branch off from that root image. Her efforts were rewarded by snippets of recognition, a glimpse of the woods, the smell of freshly cut pine, a rush of cold wind. She held onto the flashes, trying to expand them, to use them to remember the rest of what she had lost. Closing her eyes, she put all of her willpower into focusing on those flashes, those snippets of memory as the searing pain in her temples grew.

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As America had her eyes closed, the world within the rift flashed white before glitching like a bad TV screen. Trees squirmed, sounds warped, and the ground wriggled, the only thing that remained stable was America herself, unaware of what was happening around her. 

"Vhat zhe hell?" Prussia exclaimed, catching the attention of the rest of the nations. 

The group hug on the floor separated to see what the commotion was about. Finland began to panic as soon as he saw the glitching and turned to Norway, "Lukas, what's happening? Is she alright?" 

Norway furrowed his brows at the rift, "I don't know. I've never seen anything like this before. Belarus, do you have any ideas?"

Belarus shook her head as she studied the rift, just as confused as everyone else. 

"Maybe she's trying to use her magic to get out," Hungary suggested with a shrug.

"That's impossible, magic doesn't work in that dimension. She shouldn't be able to summon any, and even if she could it would be null, so it wouldn't do anything," England shot down her suggestion immediately.