Author's Note: Hey all! This is my first fic on this account, which I got inspiration for the day after watching the Tomorrow, When The War Began movie. I thought it was amazing, and that they stayed pretty well true to the book in what matters. This is a sort of musing of Ellie's, or an entry in her journal. Hope you enjoy, and reviews are much loved!
Title: You'll Be The Death Of Me (Our Time's Running Out)
Pairing: Canon couples mentioned.
Rating: PG-13 for mentions of violence and question of morals and war.
Sometimes I thought this whole crusade was hopeless. It does seem absurd looking at it from a logical point - five teenagers, fighting a war against an entire invading country with seemingly innumerable forces. Plus a few other rebels, grouped and individual, but we have no idea of the numbers. Just enough to know that there can't be a lot of them out there, in hiding, and that more are being discovered and killed every hour.
There are seven of us in total, but the others aren't with us right now. We don't know if they'll ever fight with us again. Kevin and Corrie walked right into the territory of enemy forces in the hopes that they'd help to heal Corrie - who'd been shot by their own soldiers. All we can do is hope to hell that they're still alive and the enemy spared some mercy for two harmless teenagers without weapons. But until we know for sure either way, we don't count them as a part of our group any more. It's too false-sounding to say that there's seven of us when only five are present. If we met another rebel group we'd have to explain their absence, and it's not something we can just state matter-of-factly. Whatever happens, we know they won't betray us. They'd never value their immediate safety above our lives and the small amount of hope Wirrawee has left for freedom. As wimpy as Kevin can seem, when push comes to shove and things get serious he does what needs to be done, which is exactly why he left to seek help for Corrie in the first place.
So, our group of five are surviving. We blew up a bridge connecting Wirrawee to Cobbler's Bay - a crucial point in the enemy's takeover. That bridge was the key to their access of supplies and extra soldiers. Since then we haven't been able to risk showing our faces near town to assess what good it's done us. There's been so many planes coming past recently, we can't risk it. Every hour it seems like there are more flying over us, scanning the outskirts of town for us. Hunting their prey. So we've been hiding out here in Hell to see whether it will settle down in the next week, or if there's always going to be more risk in going out from now on. If that's the case, we need to figure out a way to work around it and decide how we're going to strike them next. Homer probably has a few ideas. He's shown himself to be our leader in terms of fighting and strategy. And fight we will. One way or another, we won't give up, won't stop until either Wirrawee - and Australia - is free...or we all die. Even Robyn, who was so adamant in her protests at the beginning, when we first decided to fight back, has started to see that there's not much else we can do. She doesn't want to simply hide down here until we run out of food and slowly die off. She doesn't want to hurt the enemy by killing, but find other ways to halt their offence. She's the polar opposite of Homer, in a way. He's the calculating, logical mind who thinks in terms of strategy and chooses to look at the enemy as a dark, destructive force and so in the wrong that if they die...well, it's a war, after all. Robyn holds her morals very close and sees the other side as people, individuals, rather than a single wave of horror tearing down on us. She sees them as having families, personalities, fears, just like us. Yet at the bridge she'd proven that she'll do what she needs to in order to keep hope alive for the country. Don't forget that they have lives, she says, but they are in the wrong and so if it comes down to it and there's no choice, she'd rather them than us.
I envy them both, in a way. They see things in black and white. No matter their morals on killing, they're certain we're doing the just thing, trying to save our land from the terrible invaders. I'm not so sure.
They claim, the other country's forces, that they came because we have all this beautiful land, this wealth, this food, we have everything and yet we don't share it. They say we turn a blind eye to everyone else's suffering because it doesn't affect us. And what confuses me is...it's true. All of it. People are dying every day from lack of food or water. Millions of people have no bed to sleep in at night or no time to sleep because they can't afford to miss out on the money gained from working constantly. We don't send out enormous shipments of food for them. We have small organisations run by community members, it's true (in the larger cities, anyway; Wirrawee's too small to house many charity organisations) but drastic movements? Not one. We make no sacrifices. A twenty dollar note from one person here and there, but not enough. Nowhere near enough. I feel like we should care enough to lower our own living standards, because theirs are so much worse, surely we should sacrifice something to ensure their survival. Surely they're worth something.
And that's the entire reason they came here - to get what they've been missing out on. We wouldn't have given it to them any other way, so they were forced to invade. Doesn't that make us in the wrong? Our resistance is almost like a protest to their right to a decent lifestyle, one in which you know when your next meal will be, and the time between meals is measured in hours rather than days. Isn't that their right? Yet, on the other hand, we have families too. They came and invaded our country and forced our people from their homes and their lives. They shot any who objected. Children and seniors weren't spared and suffered as much as the able people. Babies were shot, innocent babies with no fault whatsoever in the situation. So I don't know. Everything's all so confusing. Maybe there is no right or wrong, there's only the way you perceive the world around you. For now...I don't know if it's right to kill anybody for my survival. Because Robyn is right. They're people, and they were either conscripted into this war or are passionate or angry enough about the situation in their homeland to stand up and do something about it. I think only a small percentage of them are in it for the bloodlust - the same as our armies fighting overseas. But Homer is right, too. We grew up here. We worked for this land. it wasn't handed to us, and we don't deserve to be rounded up and shot like pigs.
I guess my belief is that we have to find a balance between the two extremes - us having nothing, or them having nothing - and right here, right now, they have far more than we do. So we are justified to fight to restore that balance. But if we regain control some serious changes will have to be made.
We have no idea what country they're from. Somewhere close, Homer says. North, most likely, somewhere in Asia or roundabouts. We also have no idea if anyone's coming to help us. It's been weeks, and not a word from England or the US, who I'd just sort of assumed would come to help in this crisis - not in Wirrawee, anyway. Maybe the risk to their own forces is too great. Whoever we're fighting, they must be strong. They're taken over more coastline cities since we've been down here, having captured nine in total now. There's rebel forces in every city taken prisoner, and with the lasting supply of batteries we managed to obtain for the radio, we've heard about some small achievements they've made. One town was even re-taken by rebels, but the invasion was more poorly organised there. Us, we've been thinking it'd be a good idea to try to locate other small groups of resistance and pool our resources. We have guns, we have vehicles and we are definitely capable of doing a bit of damage, but there's some things that just can't be done without numbers.
So that's what we'll do. We'll wait it out for another week if we can down here, listening for news from outside and watching anxiously as the planes fly over. Then we'll go out in the open again. Expose ourselves and hope to gain something from it. Take risks. Maybe some of us will lose our lives. But whatever happens, we'll have fought. We'll have fought to the very best of our ability in the hope that one day we'll be free again. That both sides will have learned something and the world will be a better place for it. That's what we fight for, what Kevin and Corrie risked their lives for, what we're all risking our lives for. We stand for hope.