I was born in a thunderstorm
I grew up overnight
In a way, she has to be (should be) grateful for the constant, thrumming danger, waiting around any corner, tracing her every step, watching from high up on the rocky peaks. If it wasn't for the seemingly endless adrenaline surging through her veins, pushing her on, fuelling her weary muscles, pressing her eyes open to another freezing, grey day; she might have gone mad by now.
That's one of the options she presents to herself, in the first few days, when she's still growing accustomed to the way things are now. Some kind of psychotic disorder, she reasons- perhaps drug induced, or even born of traumatic experiences; she's certainly had plenty of those. Psychosis, or perhaps an artificial stimulation, simulated by external waves, trialling her mind, testing her? When she was younger and could devour books in nights and libraries in weeks, her parents might have told her (with a gentle sigh) to remember to live in the real world, where people didn't visit alien planets, or travel through time. It was easy for them to say that, they were parents- books had taught her that parents were either evil, disinterested enough to not notice their children, or dead. Seeing as her own parents didn't fit any of those categories, she assumed that she'd not yet come across a story to match her own, never thought to consider that such a tale had hardly been conceived. But she can still take something from the hours spent arched over the neatly printed pages, eyes straining in the din light, trying not to wake her family but unable to leave her favourite characters alone in their plight, the next page only a curl of the finger away.
In her stories, it was always essential to find food and water. There's not much to eat around, even taking into account her ignorance of the local wildlife and what might be toxic to ingest. It's a bare and barren world she's been banished to, as if the miraculous presence of a compatible atmosphere with earth is the height of all similarities. She tries the smallest sample of anything she comes across that seems innocuous, and if there are no adverse symptoms, gathers up the berries or plump leaves, fastening them to her cardigan and slinging it across her chest. It's easier to run that way.
One sleeve is torn off the first night that she actually gets some sleep. When the nightmares come, she has no hope of distinguishing them from her daily terrors, and after waking up to the shrill siren of her own screams, with barely enough time to clamber upwards and press onwards through the exhaustion to find another safe place to rest- she ties a large knot in the centre and stuffs it between her lips every night. Though it's difficult to rest with the bow at the back of her head, and she wakes with a dry mouth and an aching throat, it's safer.
When her knee is slashed open on the jagged rocks that greet her fall, she tears off the other sleeve and divides it into several long strips, changing the make-shift bandage every few days to reduce the chance of infection, storing the old strips to wash out the blood and pus when she's lucky enough to chance upon running water, and then eventually to use when she starts menstruating and there's no chance of popping over to the chemist to pick up some tampons. They never spoke about that in her novels.
And there were a few days where she couldn't find water, not long enough to kill her, but enough for her to consider the madness of turning around and going back along her tracks, trying to evade the creatures, as if she's never tried that before, as if she doesn't know precisely how terrible an idea that would be. When she eventually does find it (it in this case being a mere trickle, making it's way down a dark flat stone) it's hard to stop the tears from escaping from the corners of her eyes, but Jemma has always been one to learn from past experiences, and she cannot be sure whether they can track all body fluids (or just blood), and so she doesn't.
It's always been a matter of determination for Jemma. If she mustn't make a noise, she won't, if she needs to have the readings analysed by the next morning, they will be. Of course, sometimes things are out of her control, but she can account for those things and make adjustments. Usually. (She hadn't accounted for the so-far-as-she-knew benign giant stone swallowing her up and sending her to the other side of the galaxy, but surely that's an acceptable exception). Given everything she's encountered, she's hardly unrealistic in her self-assurance. It might be more accurate would be to say that she's disinclined to concede defeat when the means to succeed lay obtainable within her own hands.
So if it's altogether too hard to go on if she let's herself think of home, think of him; she won't.
There's rarely anything that happens utterly devoid of reason. That's her thinking, after all these years, it's something she's generally believed. And no, that doesn't mean that she's cutting the horoscope out of the magazine's in the dentist waiting room, but what she's seen, what's she's measured and read and watched, is that even in the most random findings, there are patterns, there is balance. And if something sent her here, then there's something that can send her back.
And so she runs. She hides and she digs for water. She finds shelter in caves and sleeps where she can. She ignores the deep ache in her belly that can't be sated, the way her arms are thinner than arms should be, and stronger than hers have ever been. She's grateful for the sturdy boots she'd worn every day in the labs and wishes she'd been the type to carry a knife at all times (or even just a pair of scissors). She shivers the night away, no covers or comfort, and she burns her way across the terrain with every waking moment she has left.
And if it's altogether too hard to imagine that anyone could find her here, she's going to have to find her own way home.
I was born in a thunderstorm
I grew up overnight
I played alone
I'm playing on my own
I survived