She hasn't spoken two words to you in weeks.
No matter how much you bothered her, no matter how much you flirted with her or tried to grope her or made some conversational attempt at being charming, she wouldn't spit out much more than a quiet murmur, and it made you sick to your stomach.
Mei Wang wasn't a quiet person. She was energetic, kept up a relatively cheerful demeanor despite her tendency to worry herself to pieces. But if there was one thing that could shut up his sister, the former Republic of Taiwan; it was losing the people that she cared about.
Kiku was someone she had always looked up to. Hated, sometimes, but always looked up to. To hear that he was being maliciously manipulated into an alliance with his alternate was devastating knowledge in itself, but it wasn't just the mere knowledge that affected her.
She was the one to find out first. She was the one to call him, repeatedly and fervently until the call button on her cell phone was tapped to ruin; only to hear a voice that was an exact copy of Kiku's. Upbeat, sickly-sweet inflections that sounded downright ridiculous with Kiku's gentle lilt had told her that her brother was unavailable to everyone at the moment and it's best she fucked off, in a drastically rude manner that the man she knew would never have used.
Hong Kong was dead. She couldn't even find him, and she was none too eager to see every inch of his landmass in desolate ruin. Nor did she want to see the carbon copy that murdered him. Every time he was brought up, Mei and Yao's eyes would become identical twins, water-clouded circles of amber. You had been good friends with him as well, teased him with almost as much reckless abandon as you had with Yao. Your offhand mentions of him brought a strange hitch of guilt in your throat, and you'd long since learnt how to catch yourself.
You have to give credit to Yao, though, trying to console Mei whilst being in a good amount of turmoil himself. The fact that he raised both Kiku and Hong is just as devastating as the fact that Mei had loved both of them.
That, and trying to keep everyone together. You had been staying on what was probably a decent-sized ship, but not nearly large enough to house eight tired, nervous ex-nations who desperately want alone time by this point, considering the close quarters you've been living in the past couple of months.
It's commendable, though. The way Yao managed to round up all the Asians that weren't dead or corrupted, and get them all together without being found out. The way he breaks up the inevitable squabbles over things that none of you even care about anymore. The way that he thought up the idea of steering you over to Australia and New Zealand to pick the both of them up. Not out of any personal liking for them, but out of compassion, which at this particular oh-shit-everyone-save-yourselves moment, was quite admirable.
You could tell that the presented opportunity to freely boss everyone around again exhilarated him in a way, but the circumstances this opportunity brought as well as the loss of the two people you know he cherished most (The two people you were insanely jealous of by default.)
You shared a cabin (If a bullshit closet-space that barely reached two yards could be called this), with Yao and Mei; and the sound of muted sniffling and choked-out sobs from the both of them, while it was nice that they tried to quiet them; had sickened you to your stomach to the point that you've taken to wearing headphones in your sleep. (You've found that the blaring sounds of crooning K-pop singers very nicely drowned out the sounds of…the emotional turmoil of your closest friends. Fuck.)
Sometimes, Lan would come by and you'd hear the soft hum of conversation, the low melody of Lan's comforting words quieting Mei's nigh-hysterical strings of words; and you turn your face to the salt-peppered ground and think, Damn, I wish I can talk to Yao-hyung like that, but you don't, and the next day, you pester the ranking piss out of him, cop a feel or two, but you never ask him if he's up for talking about his feelings, or about all the shit that's gone down, recently; or tell him how uncomfortable it is for you to say things like -which was invented in Korea, of course, even though you say to hell with this alternate-self stuff, you are and will always be Korea! (People say that this sort of optimistic mindset will get you in a world of trouble one day, but how much more "in a world of trouble" can you get right now?)
You laugh at Yao, and annoy him until he's physically agitated, and while you tell yourself that he needs to lighten up a little, the nuisance you're being (always have been) is just as obvious to you as to anyone else.
It's almost as sickening as the look on his face when the name "Kiku Honda" tumbles from your lips.
A/N: "Lan" is my headcanon human name for Vietnam, and "Mei", along with a good portion of the fandom, is my headcanon name for Vietnam.
So, the nations people currently on England's ship are: England, France, Seychelles, Belgium and Netherlands, Sealand, Norway and Iceland, and N. Ireland (Wales, Scotland, and Ireland are MIA)
The nations currently on China's ship are: China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, Macao, India, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand