Tom Kwan's Computer

[Pippi]

The first thing Nanna-Fiora did upon being released from the medical centre was to go into the city and purchase a terrarium.

She watched it silently, arms folded on her desk, as the drizzle hit the window outside. Haydn seemed to mirror her, sticking steadfast to a twig inside of his little glass house, staring back at her with his slightly bulbous eyes. She stuck her tongue out at him. He seemed utterly unconcerned at the gesture, unmoving except for the gentle swell of his throat-sac.

He wasn’t quite the same as Vivaldi. He was a slightly different shade of green, lighter and paler. He was slightly bigger, too. He’d also been captured in the safe house garden, on yet another of those typical British rainy days, rather than from a petshop in Denver. She’d been able to hear the frogs from her hospital bed, during the quieter moments, during the periods when the doctors weren’t working on her sword wound, or asking her endless questions about her time in the program, or making sure she didn’t have some secret contact with the Americans.

Like she ever wanted to think about those terrifying couple of days ever again.

So in many regards, Haydn wasn’t a great replacement for Vivaldi. But that was the thing; he didn’t need to be. Nanna-Fiora had never gone out of her way, crouching in the pouring rain with a Tupperware container for an hour, just to get a replacement. He wasn’t there to mend some hole in her heart, or anything like that. He was more like… a reflection. A mirror of what she’d had to leave behind. The same meaning behind it as the original, even with a different colour and shape.

Nanna-Fiora looked away from Haydn, taking a glance around her room. Slowly but surely, she was filling it up, making it almost like, but not quite, her old room, across the ocean in Denver. There were pens and pencils and notebooks from WHSmith on her desk, sitting next to a couple of songbooks. She’d found a pillow in the shape of a crescent moon in a gift store, smaller and more yellow than the one lying on her bed at home. She’d even rigged up a series of cardboard tubes to point out of her window, a stand-in for her telescope for the time being. The terrarium had wiped out the majority of the spending money she’d been allowed for the month.

She doubted the soldiers would be too enthused if she asked to buy a cockatiel, but she’d figure something out soon.

A gentle smile drifted across Nanna-Fiora’s face as she watched the rain for a while. She still spent the occasional night crying herself to sleep, sometimes loud enough for someone to run in to check she was okay. The soldiers mostly. Derrick and Yvonne a couple of times. But she was getting better, day by day. Her room was a way of showing it. Her own private rebellion. She’d survived their psychopathic murder games. Now she was in the territory of their most hated enemy, in her own room, her own, British version of her room, because she didn’t give a damn about America anymore. She was never going back there. This was home now.

She missed her parents, of course she did. She would probably always miss them, because she couldn’t see a way for them to reunite until the entirety of the United States sank into the ocean. But she was okay. She would survive. She had people who cared for her here, people who looked after her and supported her, a government that wanted her to live rather than kill herself for the good of the nation. She had Yvonne. She had Derrick.

More than anything, Mom and Dad would want her to live. She thought they’d be proud of her, if they saw her now.

Nanna-Fiora blinked, and wiped away the tears she didn’t realise were there, smiling as she looked back at Haydn.

They’d always wanted her to be happy. So that was what she was gonna be.

((Nanna-Fiora Kroos continued elsewhere))