Britain seems to have remembered it's supposed to be cold. No matter, because now I have an excuse to wear my bear-claw slippers again.
I don't own Hetalia or the characters from Peter Pan.
Wednesday 16th March 2013
( 5 a.m.)
Lili woke up briefly on my shift, during which I am writing.
"Why does my hand hurt so much?"
I volunteered to take part of the night shift because I figured I should make up for my absence during the fighting, although no one has asked me about it. I haven't explained it either. This silent guilt has been eating away at me. I wouldn't have slept if I tried to go to sleep anyways; I'm too tired to sleep.
Obviously she was confused and disorientated when she asked. Who wouldn't be after an amateur amputation? I tried to explain to her what had happened, but she was insistent her hand remained attached and was hurting her badly. Too weak to move, she couldn't lift her head to observe the stump lying beside her draped in gauze. You try convincing a half-asleep, heavily sedated girl you preformed an amputation on her left arm and prevented her from becoming a zombie - she won't believe it. I was afraid I would hurt her if I picked her arm up and showed her. I ended up calling one of the medics over.
The medic didn't try talking to her for long. He asked: "What's wrong?"
"My left hand feels like it's on fire."
He glanced at the stump and cocked an eyebrow "Your left hand was amputated. You're experiencing disambiguation. You may feel your left hand but that is only because the nerves are residual nerves are inflamed. There's nothing we can do for maladaptation, just go back to sleep and it will fade with time."
This did absolutely nothing to help. Lili repeated what she had said to me. The medic waved her words away and said to me: "Would you like me to give her a sleeping pill?"
I wanted to punch him so hard. Instead I forced a polite 'no thank you' and flipped him off when he retreated, presumably to re-adjust the steel rod jammed up his ass. Bastard. What's wrong with him? She's a patient dumbass! Where's your fucking bed-side manner?!
I understood the gist of what Dr Asshole said so I tried explaining it. I had to grope far back into my brain where it stored the junk I absorbed in Biology. "Your nerves still think your hand is there Lils. They're firing signals that tell the brain it is. (I had to think way back to Biology dredging up the next part) The brain interprets this stuff as pain because the memory of the hand being removed is in the-the Hippocampus, so what your brain was told constitutes as nonsense. The nonsense turns into pain. That pain makes it feel like the hand is still there because the nerves the information is relayed back to still believe it is."
Lili was still confused. She nodded even thought I knew she didn't understand what the heck Alfred was jabbering about, and slept again a few moments later. Poor kid. I included the explanation in case the person who reads this journal has a member of their group experiencing this, or if they have the problem themselves.
Hell I don't know if people will travel around in groups. People get lonely fast. Then again this whole thing might blow over in a couple of months. Highly unlikely but still a possibility.
Ugh. Sleep must come now. I am too tired to be too tired for sleep now. Teddy Ber just came in to sit with her, so I should pack up the book and hit the hay.
(5:00 p.m.)
It occurred to me early this morning I wanted to see the sky again.
My only view of it has been through the windows. Usually I was more interested in the churning dead beneath it, searching for signs of deterioration or starvation and I've found no hints of either dammit. But the sky is still there. A big blue or grey or white or black cradle that has the whole world under it. Even if the world underneath becomes red the sky won't change its colour. Maybe the ashes from fires I know must be ablaze the globe will stain a couple of little patches ashy, but it will be unchanged mostly. I wonder if humans will ever be able to wander up there again. With parachutes and planes and the other stuff. Will we? I like planes. The sensation of flying is one of my favourites. Right now my people are grounded, but maybe tomorrow a whole army of helicopters will land on the roof and carry us all home.
I went up to the roof alone. For student access, we have a whole staircase separate to the teachers' and Security's. The two top floors are blocked off completely with deadlocks and heavy doors. I wonder why?
When I got to the roof I wasn't alone, which I didn't realise for a long time.
First I was dazzled by the sky. It was a nasty, cold day. A harsh breeze was blowing down from the clouds and it went straight through my thin clothes. Apparently March hasn't remembered it's supposed to be March yet. It's freezing cold outside. The sky was grey, a shade of grey I have decided is the prettiest type of grey I have ever seen and probably ever will see. The clouds were heavy with rain. I hoped it would rain. I wanted to feel water that hadn't come through pipes before it touched me. I mean, odds are the water has, but I wanted to feel something that had come directly from Mama Nature. Something to remind me you're up there lady, a little thunder, a forest fire, a torrential downpour that sweeps the dead away in the resulting flood.
Haven't had a single thing. At that time, just seeing the sky again, knowing I was still in the global cradle, was enough. For a moment I shivered in the cold. Then I smelled the smoke.
A couple of meters away, Kiku was burning the flags. Usually there's a huge wall of the flags of the world in the canteen. Who knows how he got all of them down. The flags were hung in columns that almost reached the ceiling and every single one of them were burning or had been burned already. earlier I heard Bella and Antonio and Ivan talking about the total lack of flags on the Flag Wall, which I totally missed during breakfast on account of being dead tired. On the other hand I'm not completely incredulous of Kiku's ability to single-handedly strip a 2 story wall of over 200 flags, he is a trained 'ninja' after all.
As I watched he tossed the Belarusian and Ukrainian flags on the fire together. he ahd built the fire inside a triangular pit he'd stuffed with pieces of a broken chair. An empty oil drum labelled '4th floor generator' lay on its side nearby. The smell of ashes and wood-smoke and melting polymers made a disgustingly potent combination, covering up the stench of the masses crowding the grounds. The wind blew it away quickly, but more rose to replace it. There weren't many flags left. I only spoke up when he had burned the last one -Antonio's flag.
"What's up with this?"
He wasn't surprised. He probably had known I was there since I came up, his senses are scarily well honed. Wiping his ashy palms on his jeans, he turned to face me, his face dark in the shadows from the flames. "They were barely more than name tags and now this has happened, flags are useless scraps of fabric."
His words echoed my own fears identically, but I faked optimism for his sake. "We might be an…isolated incident." (Luddie style vocabulary for affect)
"You don't have to play dumb for my feelings Al-kun. If we really are the only people experiencing this, why aren't the phones working?" he gestured in the direction of the run of phone lines concealed by the trees that leaf off through the forest to a major city. "Nobody can get a signal on the cells or a connection on the landlines, the TVs aren't working, not even the emergency broadcast systems. Obviously the cities have been overwhelmed. The students of this school are supposed to be political liaisons. We're priorities for times of difficulty. If the heads of states are compromised, and I believe a lot of them have been, we are supposed to succeed them, or at least work in close conjunction with the officially appointed successor. Out of all the disasters that could conceivably occur in the world- and believe you me this is fairly fucking unexpected- the nations will need to coordinate to survive it, so why haven't they retrieved the tools shaped exactly for the purpose of coordination?"
It's hard to know how to reply to an angry Kiku. He's a calm person most of the time, and when he has an outburst like this you never know an appropriate response.
I agree. The outside world is dead or close to dying. In shambles at least. We won't be rescued. If we want to escaped we're going to have to do it on our own. when I say 'on our own' I literally mean we're going to have to rely only on each other and ourselves. Yesterday Security was zero help. Heracles almost died and Lili lost an ENTIRE HAND. They won't protect us.
Kiku is right; we're not getting any help.
"Let's save ourselves." I said "We're all sixteen, or around about. That's an adult in most societies. And we're much more skilled than the average adult, thanks to this Draconian upbringing (with thanks to Luddie for the quote). We're all close to the peak of our physical abilities and we all have basic survival training. We have a doctor. We have a genius. We can do it."
The pause was awkward. I picked through what I had said, searching for a flaw, something to give him a reason to just stare in silence the way he did.
Finally he said "You want us to become the Lost boys?"
Not the intended impression "Uh…yeah, let's go for it. I'll be Peter Pan, you can be Rufio." Me being me, this is what came out.
I can't help it. If it were someone else I might have been coherent. Talking to Kiku is like sticking an eggbeater in my skull and whirling it enthusiastically. Well the effect is anyways. I count myself lucky if actual words come out.
"What is it you came up here for?" he asked after a moment-after the moment had passed. I told him about my ache for the sky. We sat on the roof for a while, just talking. The topic varied so much I won't even bother to record all of them. Long story short; it was a nice talk. I feel so much better for it. I vented, and so did he, which was weird because it doesn't happen frequently.
But it was nice. Actually, I felt the best I have on the roof since this whole thing began.
And I think we are going to have to do what I suggested. It'll be hard. Undoubtedly some of us are going to die. Some of us are already dead.
But we can save ourselves, I know we can.
We haven't got an alternative.
a/n :Did anyone notice that broken chair thing? The statue outside the UN building in Geneva? No? alright Random, stop being so damned chuffed and tell the people something useful.
I noticed a lot of you seem confused about certain details of the story in the reviews, so feel free to drop me a PM if you want to ask any questions. I might not answer the ones that are too spoiler-ey but I will definitely do my best to explain. Thanks so much for reading and have a nice day/night/super-long night if you're reading this in the Arctic or Alaska or one of those places with ½ day ½ night years.