They wind up staying in the bunker for several days while Peter's ankle mends. Each day is spent much like the last; Netherlands is always awake before either of them and leaves to the surface to go scavenging while Denmark stays behind with Peter and plays games with him. They tear several pages out of the sketchbook to make a shoddy deck of cards and Denmark teaches him how to play rummy and black jack, neither of which works very well given that they can see the imprint of the numbers through the paper. But they preserver and by the end of several days, Denmark begrudgingly admits that Peter has surpassed him in skill and offers to teach him more swears as a reward, a prize that Peter puts on hold, not wanting to trip over his own mouth again with Denmark's bizarre way of speaking.
"It's too hard," he tells him. "Teach me how to say something dirty in a language that actually makes sense."
He spends over an hour trying to flop through old Norse before he realizes that Denmark is toying with him and he throws a wadded up ball of paper at his head and demands to know what 'perkele' means. Denmark tells him it means 'I love Sweden' in Finnish and encourages him to use the word frequently whenever they reunite with the others.
Things remain mostly uneventful. Netherlands returns around the same time each day, empty handed every time, and gives them a run down of what he has seen for the day; a newly fallen tree here, prints in the ash there. He doesn't talk much when they are all together, but Peter catches him and Denmark talking quietly during odd hours of the night when they think he is asleep, trading information based on their travels and the horrors that they have encountered. By pretending to slumber, he learns that Switzerland has fallen into chaos and that the small surviving society there has completely dissolved into violence and human butchery, people stalking each other for resources and food, regardless of where it comes from, and have begun a slow spread into Austria and southern Germany.
"Not far from where we started," Denmark tells Netherlands. "They're literally right behind us."
Sealand tries not to listen too deeply to their conversations. It scares him too much to really know, but curiosity has always been his weakness and, no matter how hard he tries, he always manages to keep one ear trained on them, catching terrible stories every night. Waterlogged bodies in Croatia. Cannibals in Hungary. Seemingly endless sink holes in Slovenia.
Complete silence in Belgium.
He tries to keep his head buried in the pillows on the third night after a particularly dark story about Denmark finding a bunker full of swollen bodies in Naples. It reminds him too much of the woman that cared for him when he first woke up. He doesn't want to know about the smell or how long it took Denmark to bury each of them; it's too gruesome, too real, and too much to think about. He turns over and starts to cover his ears, but a single word in their soft conversation immediately grabs his attention.
France.
"Ran into France a few months ago," Netherlands tells him over the edge of his cup. "They were on their way to a shelter in Leipzig."
The legs of Denmark's chair clack loudly against the floor when he lurches forward to catch his dropped coffee. "What? France? He's okay?"
Netherlands shrugs. "He's alive."
Denmark wipes the spilled drink off of the front of his coat. "How was he? Were you able to talk to him at all?"
"He doesn't have any arms anymore. He's got most of the left one, but the right one's gone at the shoulder." He sips his water. "He was with Germany and England. Buncha civilians too."
Denmark sags in relief. "Oh shit, that's such a relief. They're still okay?"
"Germany's doing all right. Still an OCD tight-ass, anyhow. England doesn't talk much on account of the heat from before, but that's pretty much expected."
