Paint it Another Colour

Chapter 61

Egor - 2p Estonia
Thomas - 2p Lithuania
Sadaquat - 2p Turkey
Irina - 2p Ukraine
Nadya - 2p Belarus
Metod - 2p Slovakia
Markell - 2p Denmark
Thurston - 2p Finland
Bernard - 2p Sweden
Tomas - 2p Bulgaria
Ruslan - 2p Latvia
Ghazi  - 2p Egypt
Hermes - 2p Greece
Batbayar - 2p Mongolia
Vasska - Romania
Yue Wang - 2p Taiwan
Henrique - 2p Portugal
Martin - 2p Argentina

Sorry for so many names! There was a slight confusion about characters a couple of chapters ago, and seeing as there was a couple of new characters, I thought I'd put all the names people might be a bit unsure about here, just in case.

For once, Luciano didn't shout, simply stood at the head of the table, hands placed firmly on his hips as he glared around the room in disgust. Normally, the nations weren't like this at meetings. They were noisy, of course, but usually, the second he walked in, the noise would gradually fall to silence, and they could continue with the meeting. It didn't help that they didn't even really have anywhere in which to have meetings anymore anyway: currently, they were all stood around in a room that had survived the explosion. It had been luckier than most, although, luckier than everyone if Oliver hadn't come for them all. After a moment, he grew impatient and slammed his knife down into the wood of the table, shouting curse words in Italian as he did so. As if only just realising he was in the room, everyone froze, turning to stare at him and slowly dropping to their seats. 

"Thank you" Luciano huffed, giving them a mock bow and then yanking his knife out of the table again. "That took too long. We're starting to sound like those counterparts of ours." No one answered at the mention of the counterparts, just continued staring blankly at him. "Right" he sighed, raking a hand through his hair and running over the topic in his head. It wasn't a good one, and he knew people wouldn't be happy about it, but it had to be addressed. "Right" he repeated, looking up at them. "The last few days haven't exactly been working in our favour, as you can probably tell" he gestured around the room at the mess and out of the window at the rubble. "But that doesn't matter." He trailed off for a second. Why didn't it matter? Of course it mattered. At this point, everything mattered to them all, including him. What was he saying? "Although we lost... some nations when we were attacked, we have to think about how many they lost too, and..."

"Twenty-nine"

Luciano stopped and turned to stare at Francois. "Sorry?"

Francois blew out a perfectly shaped smoke ring and then faced him. "Twenty-nine of us died."

There was a ripple of shock across the room and Luciano swallowed. "And how many of them died?" 

Francois shrugged, puffing on his cigarette again. "I don't know. I didn't count them. Not quite as many I wouldn't think, although we did get a lot of them before hand."

"Right" Luciano snapped, indicating that he'd heard enough. "So, quite a few of us have died, probably less than them, but at least we know that ours are dead. At least they don't have any of us." He hesitated a second and glanced at Viktor. "Who do we have?"

"We have five" Viktor held up the corresponding amount of fingers. "Roderich, Lida, Wendy, Yong Soo and Kyung Soo."

Luciano nodded and glanced around the now interested looking faces. "If you have any grudges or pent up anger you need to get out, you know where to go."

Oliver stood up, stacking a few sheets of paper as he did so, and cleared his throat. "I didn't want to be the one who had to do this, but apparently, I have to be." He frowned in Luciano's direction and then cleared his throat again, shifting through his sheets as though trying to waste time. "Um... well... as Francois said, we have lost twenty-nine of our own, around twelve in the explosion, probably, and... uh..."