Prompt: Waiting

Characters: Tuuri


It wasn't fair.

All Lalli had to do was go through decon, and he was free to go. He hated it, sure, but what did he have to complain about? He wasn't the one who was getting stuck in quarantine for two weeks straight.

Tuuri sighed, and tugged at the stiff white clothes they'd given her to wear. She had a book (not one of the ones they'd salvaged; no, those had been snapped up right away and put in a safe place), but she'd already read it cover to cover at least five times, and she didn't have anything else to read or any writing materials or any machines to tinker with or… well, anything.

She had talked to Onni a few times. …lots of times. He wasn't very good at hiding the fact that he'd been crying, either.

"I'm pretty sure I'm not infected," she'd told him, every time. "I wore my mask, I'll be fine!"

Occasionally, one of the others would stop by as well—Emil was pretty good about stopping for a chat, and Sigrun… well, it wasn't always a conversation exactly, but listening to Sigrun talk was still far better than listening to nothing. Someone representing the Nordic Council had even come by a few times to ask questions about her notes. So at least the isolation wasn't bad enough to make her go out of her mind… just bad enough to give her plenty of time to think about things she'd rather not think about quite yet.

What was she going to do now?

The adventure was over. She learned so much and seen so many new things; how could her next job, no matter how lucrative or prestigious, compare? Come to think of it, she didn't even know what she wanted to do for her next job. Go back to Finland? Spend the rest of her life imprisoned behind military walls, copying out other people's reports and repairing other people's machines? If Onni had his way she'd never leave Keuruu again… but Onni didn't have to have his way.

You couldn't get much more adventurous than the Silent World, of course, but there was still plenty of the Known World left to explore. That military base at Øresund had been a floating wonder; she was still itching to know more about how it operated. She'd barely gotten to see any of Mora, with its moving walkways and electricity that never went out.

Come to think of it, they'd have to cross the exclusion zones again to get back home, and she knew Onni would be none too eager to do that.

Tuuri grinned a bit as she felt the beginnings of a plan take seed in her mind. Maybe she could talk her brother into staying just a little bit longer.