A/N: Two chapters out today! It's a new record!

The next POVs might be China a lot, because everybody loves China, right? :3

Review! :D

China woke up groaning, his mouth feeling sticky. His head was pounding, and he found he'd chewed through his lower lip.

Fearing that he'd had a flashback on the opium wars -the effect of opium was close to how he felt now- he groped around for a weapon.

His hand met what felt like a turd, and he withdrew it too quickly, making white spots dance across his vision.

And then he remembered the nightmare.

His breath caught as he fought against it in his head, unwilling to let the dark roots of terror take hold again. The one he was most afraid of on a rampage, killing at least three before the nightmare floated away.

Was it only a nightmare? Was it, aru? He had no way to tell if anyone was alive. For all he knew, he was trapped in a cell for the murderer to come back and torture later. In this gray place, anything could be.

In an effort to calm himself, he broke off a piece of the brown-green slab of turd on the tray and tossed it at the bars. It bounced off the open air between two as if there was a solid wall there and flopped squishily back towards him.

Now bored instead of afraid, China tried again. This time, as it neared the bars, a sort of electricity snapped down the length of it and turned it into a pile of ash with a loud sizzle.

He decided not to throw any more of the slab – he couldn't think of it as food, not yet – at the bars. Maybe he'd get better food if he didn't eat it….

But then again, maybe they'd stop feeding him.

With one foot, he nudged the tray away from him and let himself fall into a sleep that was thankfully dreamless, either not noticing or not caring about the sweet-scented white flakes falling from the ceiling.

A timeless time later, he woke up. Sort of. The time between waking and dreaming, when you can fall back under or jerk fully awake. He was lying on the ground, feeling a strange sense of peace, watching the aliens go through the contents of all the nations' pockets. He could see the rest of the nations were in here too, vague dark hulks on the ground, and he wondered if he should go wake them up too. But something was wrong with his vision; it danced around like sheets in a strong wind. Instead of thinking too hard, he focused on the closer aliens, who were curiously poking through a pile of phones, an extra hamburger, a stick of chalk, a rose, a pack of pasta, and a can that probably used to have beer in it.

Coming a bit more out of his daze, he realized his Hello-Kitty phone was among the pile, and wanted to bash his head against the wall when he realized he simply could've called someone at any time to let them know they were in trouble. He itched to reach out and take his phone back but he wasn't moving. Like he was paralyzed.

One of the phones rang and all the aliens jumped. China would've laughed, but it was too much effort, and besides, he was feeling strange.

"Hey, West, come bail me out of Austria's house. If I step outside this room, Hungary'll brain me." He recognized Prussia's voice.

Some powder seemed to be falling from the ceiling, and he was tired, so he went back to sleep.

China woke up, thinking that he'd had a strange dream or forgotten something important. He snatched at the memory of sound and white powder, but it was gone, leaving nothing salvageable behind.

"I've been doing a lot of sleeping lately, haven't I, aru?" he said to himself, and wondered if that meant he was going crazy. Talking to himself. "There's just nothing to do, aru." He answered himself.

After trying to amuse himself by throwing pieces of hair at the electrified bars and watching the resulting piles of ash tumble down, he decided to make a tally of how many awakes and asleeps he had. There was no way to tell time, because he hadn't worn his watch.

China spat on the ashes and stirred them into a paste, pretending to be using the old calligraphic tools of his culture. The ashy water didn't even come close to resembling ink, but hey, he tried.

Dipping a finger in the streaky 'ink', he drew an uneven line on the gray wall. One. One waking. But there had been more than that, right? Four or five, right? Unable to figure it out, he simply tallied up five.

Then white flakes tumbled from the ceiling like snow.

China held his breath. He didn't want a repeat of the nightmares, or the escaped memory that may or may not have been bad that still eluded him.

But he could only hold his breath for so long, and the powder kept falling, sliding around him and landing on him. Finally, China inhaled with an explosive gasp, sending the snowflake powder tumbling.

And was unconscious in the time it took to breathe it in.

He still dreamed, not a nightmare yet, of a gray sky and a slate ocean, crawling up to a beach of silver ash sand. The shoreline swung around a curve and vanished into thick fog.

In the dream he was barefoot in the shallows, perhaps ten feet out, the water swirling around his knees. He felt the sand erode out from under him. The waves tugged at him, and the see loomed beyond, a menacing mass of water boiling into a furious tide.

Suddenly afraid, he turned and splashed towards shore, before the new wall of water could reach him and…what? Drown him? He was a proficient swimmer, and he wasn't that far out. But the water clung to him like molasses, and each time he turned to peer around, the new wave was closer, and when he looked back he was farther from shore.

The next time he turned around a fist of water punched him in the face and swamped him in choking thickness, knocking him head over heels in the turbulent froth.

Somehow his head surfaced and he struggled blindly for the silver shore, literally clawing the water aside to force his passage. It pulled him back and played with him, cat and mouse, tossing him back and forth until when his outstretched hands met soft, waterlogged sand, he didn't believe it at first.

He crawled up and lay panting beyond the cruel ocean's reach. It raged impotently, throwing arms of itself up behind him. All fell short.

Eventually, he roused himself and crawled further up the beach, evolving from hands and knees to just knees and then feet. The ocean hissed further up the beach behind him, and he threw himself forwards into a bright light, across the threshold of awareness for the fourth time.