towerofanimus | Cuatro

Entry tags:

Cuatro

Characters: Spain, open to everyone~
Setting: Floor Thirteenth, the cathedral
Format: I'll adapt to match.
Summary: Spain mourns.
Warnings: TBA

Amongst the murmurs in the cathedral, there is a second sound. A soft, muffled sobbing from one female nation, as she sits hunched over in one of the pews there.

Spain wishes to be alone after what she did earlier, remembering every detail with clarity. The sight of her beloved Romana wasted away to almost nothing after a so-called surgery, and then having to kill her herself, it was all too much for the older nation.

She remembers that the dead are revived the next day, and she had looked everywhere once morning came, but she couldn't find Romana anywhere. Her voice was gone by the second day of searching, and her feet hurt, but she couldn't give up.

Now, on the fourth day, she sits here, on the thirteenth floor, praying for someone to return Romana to her.

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Ienzo had been over on the opposite side of the room. He wasn't sitting in the pews, praying, or indeed doing anything even remotely religious; instead, he was inspecting the architecture within the cathedral. Partly out of curiosity, he'll admit, but also partly because he wanted to see if there were any tip-offs to the location of the place through what the place was made out of. It didn't look like there was, at least as far as he could identify; there were many pictures of the same man at regular intervals throughout the building, but there was nothing he could make heads or tails of.

He had been so concentrated on this, in fact, that it took him several minutes before he noticed that there was someone else in that room -- someone who was making occasional sounds that suggested crying. With the quiet tread that he normally used only for sneaking around libraries, Ienzo creeped slowly towards them; only enough to hear clearly if they're crying or not, you'll understand. Hooray for curiosity denial.

He realized two things at exactly the same time: one, this person was in fact crying, and two, it was Spain doing it.

Flashing back to the first time he had found her feeling heartbroken on a sofa, he reverted back to a normal walk and moved to stand at the end of her row.

The sound of his footsteps were faint due to the floor's strange acoustics, and Spain didn't notice him at first, eyes still closed and praying in between sobs.

Tightening his expression even further, Ienzo started walking (somewhat awkwardly) down the pew. "...Spain...?" The feeling hadn't been around before, but it seemed that now he was walking down these narrow rows, there was a vibe telling him that he wasn't welcome here...

Her head snapped up at her name, and she rubbed at her eyes, trying to make herself presentable. It wasn't good to show her crying self to the children.

"I-Ieño?"

...He shouldn't have done this. Oh god. He should have just turned around and left the room right there. Urgh. Urgh. But instead of voicing these opinions, he merely kept his expression level as he spoke. "...What has upset you?" Not that there was any shortage of concerns, of course.

Spain sighed again, fingers clutching at her skirt. "I... I can't find Romana."

Romana. Spain had spoken of her earlier, he believed; by the way she talked it seemed almost as if Romana had been a sister, or perhaps a daughter. It was understandable how distressed she was about being unable to find her. He felt sure Spain had looked all over the tower for her, which meant that Romana had to have been taken from them by some other means.

There were, so far, three ways someone could 'disappear' from the tower -- one, return to their old world for a period of time, and then come back with their ravaged world fresh in their minds. (Ienzo allowed his face to cringe slightly at this -- if all of their worlds had been destroyed, so was his.) Two, they disappear from the tower and do not come back, in which case they are presumed to be trapped in their old world, and their name is removed from the dormitory listing for which they used to belong. Three, they are stolen by the Tower staff for experimentation.

...Urk. This was not the kind of thing he really wanted to tell Spain right now, so instead, he fabricated some other suggestion. "...Have you tried asking in a network post...?"

The network... Spain rarely touched the network, and only because she wasn't sure if the information she input would be sent to the Tower staff and monitored. That's an invasion of privacy that Spain won't chance to take.

"No. I prefer to search for her physically."

...Well, preferences are preferences, he supposed, even if it made infinitely more sense to ask everyone in the tower simultaneously than just walk around and look for her. Perhaps a few months ago he would have agreed with her, though he had mostly focused on the fact that he didn't exactly trust all of this newfangled technology. The feeling was gone now, and he was more comfortable now that he knew what that stupid Shift button did (it made capital letters! Who knew?).

"...I understand," he said quietly, and then, finding himself otherwise out of ideas, returned to the first one. "...What room is she in...?"

"She was in room 1-09, I believe." That was the first place she looked for, and had continued to check that room every time she passed by the dorms. Still no sign of Romana.

"...Is she dead, for real?"

"There's no way to tell for sure." Ienzo shook his head. "...I was thinking... if her name was still listed under room 1-09, then she was still in the tower... and if it wasn't, she went home or-- ...something." Ienzo just about wanted to kill himself for using the words 'or' and 'something' next to one another; he realized about halfway through his speech that saying "or something else happened to her" would be a bad idea, though.

He could speculate further (perhaps the owners were trying out something new on her, but weren't announcing it to the whole tower?), but it probably wouldn't be welcomed right now, so he would save it for later.

"I... killed her, Ieño."

There, she confessed to him. She had a hard time keeping it to herself, and Ienzo was the perhaps the safest person she could tell. He doesn't judge, from what she knew of him; his mind works in analytical ways, which was what Spain wanted at the moment. She doesn't want to be pitied, only acknowledged.

"I shot her, because I didn't want her to suffer what she went through as an 'experiment'. But, now, I'm afraid I might have killed for good."

...

Okay, this gave him pause for a moment. Not even the normal pause, where he's deliberating over what to say next; no, Spain actually stopped him in his tracks. To her merit, that's pretty impressive. He was only faintly aware that she was calling him by that nickname again. She killed him? Why? Ienzo, having been affected with a sudden desire to hole himself up in his room all day long, had been entirely unaware of the goings-on of the Tower during the 'event' -- so of course he had heard nothing about the sudden killings. The best he could assume was that she had suffered some kind of mental breakdown from the things that had happened in the Tower, which to be perfectly honest, wasn't a radical assumption at all.

...And yes, now that she elaborated, it seems that was what happened. Distressed and not thinking logically (how would killing her save her from 'experimentation', if she would be revived and therefore placed back into the pool the next morning?), she did something terrible... and now Romana isn't coming back, or so she thinks. "...Everyone here is at a disadvantage, because there is a group of people more powerful than us... and they can do whatever they like, and don't necessarily need to inform us." He looked around briefly, and then sit down; not particularly close to Spain, but enough so that she could hear him. "...Generally... if they do something to us, it happens over the span of a week... if they have taken her, then if they're going to release her, it will probably be in a few days."

"That's what I thought too." She sighed, biting her lip as she forced herself not to cry again. "But, I have been looking for a few days, and she still hasn't reappeared. That's what I'm worried about... that I might have killed her for good."

There’s still a very big unknown variable here, just like everything else in the Tower… but still, it is entirely possible that the owners ‘changed it’ so that when people died, they died for good. He was running out of hypotheses, and of course, ‘sympathy’ had never really been a word in his dictionary. “…In that case…” he muttered. “…there is nothing to be done but just watch for her… and wait.”

"... Sí... I suppose that is the case now..."

Spain sighed again, fiddling with the hem of her shirt. It seemed like there's no hope left for her.

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Cuatro

;_;

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I'm sorry all my tags are unkoalatea today. ;n;

...can we make 'unkoalatea' a word now

it has always been a word on tumblr