~PoM & M~
Let's just rewind about a week and a half or so to see how this whole mess started. Would you believe it began with Private sleeping in his bunk like normal? Well, it did. What Private was dreaming about, however, wasn't all that normal.
Private always had dreams. The little penguin loved his dreams. They had all his favorite things; his friends, Lunacorns, and all the Peanut Butter Winky's he could imagine!
Just like the Lunacorns say, imagination goes a long way and is very important. The penguin had a good imagination; he was always very optimistic and hopeful and he loved all his friends. He'd never wish anything bad to happen to them. He also loved his team; Skipper, Kowalski, and Rico. The three were closer to the young penguin than anyone else, they were his family.
He had a lot of friends he thought of as family here at the zoo. Big ones, small ones, short ones, and tall ones. They all made up one big and peculiar family of animals of all kinds. He loved everyone in the zoo, but he did have some friends outside of the zoo. Max the moon-cat was a friend, and good old Fred. Despite their differences on where to use the loo, he liked to think of Frankie the pigeon a friend as well. This brought him to thinking about friends he even had out of this country, and ones he met outside of the country. He'd met many friends back on Madagascar. The lemurs were awful friendly there, especially Willy the lemur who seemed to like everyone he met a whole lot. Nice Willy, what a guy.
He'd met Julien, Maurice, and Mort back on Madagascar and the lemurs had come with them to their trek back to the zoo. They'd gone many places and made new friends. From Madagascar, to Europe, Rome, and back to the zoo where they all lived today.
The private was having an almost livid dream, morphing to all the fun times he's had with all his friends. But his dream was almost livid, meaning he didn't have complete control of it. It began to spin out of control in the form of a plane crash, and his lovely dream transformed into a horrible nightmare. He saw himself disappointing all his friends and letting them all down. His teammates stared at him with disapproving looks and the entire zoo shunned him with his own shame. He tried begging for their forgiveness for letting them all down, for whatever he did that caused them to be sore. Then his dream morphed into some whole other scene. He was on a plane with his team, and they were all laughing such horrid evil laughs, staring down at some poor saps who weren't lucky enough to board the craft in time. Was that…? No, it couldn't be! But it WAS!
In his dream he watched Skipper laugh down on them shouting as if it were the funniest thing in the world and that's when he heard his leader say it. The words of betrayal.
Private tossed and turned in his bunk as he remembered every time his leader ever said those words…
"We just left, Private! WE AREN'T GOING BACK! You should have gone before we left!"
"If that's how you feel about it then have it your way, Marlene! Just remember this; If you kick me out of your habitat, I AM NEVER COMING BACK!"
"I refuse to go back! I AM NEVER GOING BACK TO DENMARK! DO YOU HEAR ME?!"
"Not Hoboken…NEVER! YOU HEAR ME, HUH?"
"Never going back to that needle-pushing quack doctor again! Man's a butcher with a degree!"
"I hope you got what you wanted out of that store, men. Because there are no returns and we aren't going back."
Then there's the one that haunts him the most, the one he could never forget as long as he lived. The big one, the one that changed everything and went against all morals.
"We'll be back from our gambling spree in a couple of weeks, or whenever the gold runs out." Skipper announced over the radio of the then lifting off plane. "…JUST KIDDING! WE'RE NEVER COMING BACK! …Initiate warp drive!"
Private still remembers the hurt on Alex, Marty, Melman, and Gloria's faces when they just took off without looking back. At first the small penguin thought the leader was joking when he said that, but after a quick look around the cockpit to see that no one was laughing, he saw it as the horrible truth it was. They were really abandoning their friends! And what was worse, there was nothing the private could do to change Skipper's mind as they flew off to Europe.
The private awoke with a start, sitting up breathing heavily in his bunk. The young cadet looked around, both above and below his bed space. He was thrown into immediate alarm. How could he oversleep? What would Skipper say to him about this? He could just hear his leader now, scolding him! …Actually, he did hear Skipper's voice.
"I AM NEVER COMING BACK...!" The leader's voice yelled, echoing off the HQ walls.
The private gasped, fearing that his dream was coming back to haunt him again. Then he heard the rest of the statement.
"…to play this game with you guys!" Skipper finished, mildly annoyed. "Seriously! Kowalski takes too long with his turns and Rico's a cheating maniac!"
"Nuh uh!" Rico defended but accidentally burped up an extra Ace card he'd been hiding in his stomach. The weapon's expert blinked and shrugged sheepishly. "He he he…" Rico chuckled.
On the other side of the makeshift table in the middle of their HQ, Kowalski concentrated on using his abacus to count. The analyst defended himself while sliding the pieces to either side of the math tool. "I don't take too long with my turns, Skipper. I am simply multiplying the number of cards I have by the number of turns I get to calculate my average of winning the game."
"Smoked salmon, man! This shouldn't have to be so complicated!" Skipper complained.
But the analyst wasn't hearing him. "Mm-hm…Just as I suspected!" analyzed Kowalski. "Skipper, what's the full diameter across of your wrist?"
"Uh, captain brainiac, we're penguins! We don't have wrists! And if we did, I would've opened mine up ten minutes after starting this outlandish card game!" The leader confessed.
"Right…" Kowalski picked up his clipboard and jotted down notes. "Penguins…" the analyst spoke the words slowly to get them down on the paper. "…don't…have…wrists. I got it now! The equation shouldn't be divided by the diameter of a wrist but by the degrees of which the flipper is turned! Genius! I'll be ready to take my turn in just a few moments, Skipper!"
Skipper groaned and tossed the upper half of his body forward on the table. The leader beat his fisted flipper into the table in mental agony.
In his bunk, Private sighed in relief that everything was normal. He also noticed that today was Saturday, which meant it was rest and relaxation day. He hadn't overslept and he didn't miss training like he at first thought. Today wouldn't start so bad after all. The young penguin stretched with a yawn and slid down out of his bunk to join the rest of his team at the table.
"Good morning, Skippah." Private greeted his leader with a smile.
Skipper lifted his face from the table with a grin at the young boy. "Hey boys, look who finally decided to get up. Morning, Private. Hope you slept well."
"Alright I suppose." Private shrugged as he sat at the table, but his leader could read him like a book.
"Nope, that's not gonna fly with me. What's with that outlandish look in those eyes, soldier?"
"Skippah..."
"What's on your mind?"
The private sighed. He knew he could never get anything past Skipper so why was he trying? It was pointless to try, so he prepared himself to say the inevitable. I mean it needed to be at least brought up, right?
Private fiddled with his flippers and then looked up, rubbing his feathers on his chest nervously. "How you do suppose Alex and the others are doing then?"
There was a silence around the HQ and an awkward cough from the analyst as he hastily excused himself from the card game, mumbling something about his equation requiring a protractor which he needed to get from his lab. It was obviously an excuse to get far away from the conversation.
Rico looked indifferent before he realized he was supposed to react the same as Kowalski, so he looked at the silence some more before humorously beginning to brokenly whistle while casually walking away from the table.
Skipper shrugged. "I'm sure they're alright out there in the wild. They wanted to go to Connecticut right? I bet they're having fun there. Those crazy hippies, probably sitting in a drum circle talking about world peace and whatever it is hippie pansy freaks have to talk about." The leader waved off, completely convinced with his own theories. "The hippies are fine."
"Perhaps we shouldn't have left them, sir. Maybe we should have gone back to help them." Private said.
"Private, please, they're over six feet tall and one of them's a psychotic lion with crazy hair. The humans aren't going to mess with something like that. I know I wouldn't, no. Leave that to the lion tamers and animal rights wackos. THEY can deal with lions, but us? No can do."
"Skippah, I'm just worried that-"
"They're not going to get back here and enact some horrible revenge on us if that's what you're worried about. It's best to just let it go and live your life. The past is the past."
"But Skippah-"
"Just forget about it, Private and that's an order. All that's behind us now. What's done is done. There's no way they're getting back here, and like I said, they're fine. Do you really think something can take down a lion? And before you suggest that psycho of a woman. We took care of her, didn't we? Last we saw of her she was on a boat, in a crate, full speed ahead for Madagascar. There's no way she'll come back either. We took the plane." Skipper laughed. "What's she gonna do? SWIM back? Ha! I'd like to see her try! Nah, we're fine, they're fine, everyone's fine. As it should be."
Kowalski had made it back with the protractor hallway through the rant but found himself unable to use it. He himself was thinking back to when they first escaped the zoo, as was the other two outranked penguins. The analyst admitted that back then he was a bit on the dull and emotionless side. It was unnerving to him now.
Rico remembered when he was always beyond excited and willing to blow things up more than necessary. He had fun. Too much fun. "He he he! Aw'right! Kaboom!"
Private was still frowning as he thought over and over about their friends they betrayed. How could they do such a thing and not look back the way they did? Were they completely heartless birds back then? Were they always so rash?
"Kaboom! Kaboom!" The weapon's expert exclaimed over and over, babbling and having a relapse of his past streaks of uncontrollable rowdiness. He was smacked back to reality by his leader and he looked down just like his other two subordinate teammates. "Oh…heh…bad kaboom! Yeh…"
"Trust me, it was best we did what we did, leaving those freaks behind." Their leader reassured.
The three subsidiary penguins gave each other unconvinced looks. Maybe it was a bit harsh to abandon the giraffe, hippo, zebra, and lion. It may have even been wrong of them to do so. They didn't like doing the wrong thing. They admit they didn't do as much objecting as they should have when their leader opted on leaving the four zoosters, but it was a different time back then! They were all different back when they first escaped under the walls of the zoo back in 2005. The team was still new to them and they even admit they had no idea what they were getting themselves into a good majority of the time. But they did learn, and all four became better penguins because of it. Now that they looked at it, maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that they abandoned their old friends. But it was already too late to back out of whatever assumptions their regretful looks gave their leader.
"You don't believe me?" asked their commander.
"It's not that at all, Skippah." Private started, defending himself and the other two penguins. "It's just that we feel kind of bad about leaving them is all. I'm just not sure if we did the right thing by just abandoning them in their time of need."
Kowalski and Rico nodded in solemn agreement. They too had some guilt stored up inside.
"Very well," Skipper sighed and began leaving the base. "Follow me."
"Uh, where are we going?" asked Kowalski, confused at the sudden instructions.
"Topside." The leader said, already halfway up the ladder. "I want to show you boys something…"