Ahhh, sorry, everyone, the formatting is a little wonky in the last few chapters. I'm still trying to figure this whole thing out. Please bear with me!
Though Denmark continues to ooze optimism, it takes them over a week before they finally find a trading post.
In the days leading up to its discovery, they do little more than walk at the same steady pace, a pace often broken by Peter's need to stop and rest his feet every few kilometers until his weak legs finally begin to build up a tolerance after the fifth day when he is forced to haul himself over the jagged pieces of a broken bridge. Denmark offers to help him at every opportunity, helping him to balance or climb, even suggesting several times that Peter should ride on his back. And while he might appreciate the Dane's hand when they cross eerie, empty intersections or expanses of fallen buildings, he refuses each time he offers to carry him.
"I'm not a little kid!" Is his incensed reply each time and it is always met by Denmark smiling through his bandana and agreeing with him.
In the first several days of their journey, they keep a steady stream of conversation, kept up by Sealand's questions about where Denmark has been and what he has seen in what is left of the fractured land. Most of his questions are about nature and cities, not wanting to know about the people in them or what has become of them, but his curiosity soon bests him and he asks him about Spain and Italy and their quest to find surviving humans left in the rubble. Denmark answers him honestly and when he asks what became of Romano, he never pauses.
"He made it through the initial bursts," Denmark says to him as he yanks on the back door of an overturned semi truck. "The problem is that everything was still on fire and he was too hurt to get out of Cosenza in time. Here, hand me the crowbar out of my bag, will you?"
"What happened to Cosenza?" He hands him the bar and stands behind, watching him force the doors open and hop inside.
"Burned up. It was still on fire by the time I got there, but there's not much left." He drags out a plastic crate full of small boxes and begins to tear them open, mouth turned down in a hard grimace when the smell of rotten vegetables floods the truck. "Spain tried to find him, but with that leg of his, he wasn't fast enough. He found Feliciano out of complete luck, but by the time he got to Romano, there wasn't even anything left to bury." He sighs and tosses the last box over his shoulder.
"Nothing worth taking in here."
His blunt answers at first bother him. Sweden had told him stories of before, when he, Denmark, and Norway had been together, and had described Denmark as being rather heartless, an adjective that seems fitting when his face never changes as he tells Sealand about the charred bodies in Venice and the gate made of bones at the Swiss border. Even when he speaks of the others, how thin Italy had become and how Spain relied on a heavy piece of metal to walk, his voice remains flat and detached and it grates at Peter until he eventually just asks why.
"You don't sound too upset about it," he tells him when they stop to rest by the remains of a dried up creek. He sits beside him and plays with the ash at his feet with a long stick, not particularly wanting to look at him when he draws out the map to mark their progress. "How can you be like that?"
"Whaddya mean?"
"I mean, you sound like you don't even care."
Denmark sighs and leans back against the tree trunk behind them. "Look, Peter, that's not it. You can't even imagine how much that isn't it."
"So...what is it then?"
"I'm old. Really old. I've seen a lot of awful things happen and this is how I've learned to deal with it. I've gotta be completely straight forward about things because if I try to sugarcoat it into something it isn't, it makes it even worse when the truth hits you in the face." He folds up the map and hands him a nearly empty bottle of water. "Y'get it?"
