Fics like Part I - Rheingold, 1812-1850

During the Wars of Liberation against France, Gilbert follows a phantom pain to a secluded monastery in the Rheingau where he finds the comatose boy: Ludwig; though the Holy Roman Empire is dead in name, Germany persists as a physical remnant of a people yet to be truly unified. Gilbert recognizes the opportunity as a way to secure Prussia’s place in a post-Napoleonic Europe. He brings Ludwig under his wing, shelters him, breaks and rebuilds him as his greatest creation. But for Ludwig, becoming Germany comes at a cost. Raised amid war and relentless expectation, he learns to surrender poetry for obedience, memory for purpose, and doubt for duty, until the question is no longer who he was, but what he is being forged to become. tl;dr: A historical, canon-divergent retelling of Germany’s nation-building process, spanning the Wars of the Sixth Coalition to the failed March Revolution, in which their relationship develops into a compulsive, unsettling intimacy, mirroring a unification that binds as much as it consumes.

Fics like Part I - Rheingold, 1812-1850

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