Making a home out of a house;
Making a shelter out of a heart.
It's hot, that morning.
It's an ordinary morning, of an ordinary day.
The sky is still colored by reddish shades as well as a turbid cloud of radiations is still covering that planet once blue and full of life, now so dull, so grim, so lonely. A smoke blanket makes the air unbreathable and if it wasn't for the solid walls of the bunker, there woudn't be any shelter, any safeness, any place to call home again.
Home.
If a place like that could still exist on that Earth devastated by the apocalypse, Clarke Griffin wondered everyday during the long and neverending hours spent counting the minutes on the fingers of her hands. She still remembers the day they arrived, after years spent in space, and the ground, for the first time, was truly ground, the wind was truly wind and the sun that was shining on them was truly warm. She remembers the dropship and the fences, the tents and the fire that have been burning for nights; she remembers the bioluminescent butterflies, the hallucinogenic nuts and the innocence they hadn't lost yet, within those walls where for the first time they had somehow managed to feel at home.
Then the others arrived and the dropship was just a secret refuge, an anchor of the past to which they could cling when reality was becoming too real, too cruel. Home got a new name, Camp Jaha, and soon after it changed again, but either it was Arkadia or something else, it remained a place where they could always come back, a place to love.
Sometimes it was hard, knowing she could come back, knowing she had to: it always reminded her the price they had to pay for a place they could carry on calling home. And the sorrow, the uncertainces, the stabbing pain in her chest while she was pulling that lever in Mount Weather, came worse then ever in her memories and regrets. It hurts, now, thinking of a home that empty, that abandoned, that silent.
Radiations came first, along with the tossic cloud, and there were days in which Clarke Griffin could still feel the skin burning, the wounds opening and the air getting hotter and hotter, heavier and heavier, less and less breathable. There were days in which ghosts haunted her with no end at the bare light of the day _if you could call light the feeble light of the lab_ and they reproached her the past that she was still so tormented by; they cried and screamed, reminding her of the mistakes that had caused eveyone to die, the hypocrisy Wanheda ruled by and played God, deciding who could have lived and who must have died.
Then the silence arrived.
Days and days of neverending silence.
And she thought she would have gone mad in that light-blued-outlined prison, a color so fake, so unreal compared to the clear blue sky that first day on Earth.
And she went mad, somehow, among he tears that didn't seem willing to stop rolling down her face and the gaze lost somewhere in the emptiness of the room, addressed, maybe, to the demons of her memory whom she hadn't the energies neither to answer nor to fight.
At the end, after months of loneliness, resentment, fears, unwished dreams and vane hopes, a light had come to the corners of her mind and somehow she managed to get up again. Suddenly, the past was smiling back at her and all the weights that she had always had to carry, went away like feathers in the wind.
She had a plan, a lab, she had five long years to prepare the panet for a new invasion. A planned one, this time.
It was hard, no doubts about it. Earth coudn't just reborn and surviving was hard, it was hard living, everything was hard, but something suggested that she had to resist, to wait, to hope, like that time when she asked Bellamy what they would have done with the list of the hundred and he answered that they would have hidden it and found a new solution. It was then that she understood there was still hope.
It wasn't the moment to give up.
When she finally got away from the walls that kept her caged for those that seemed years, her eyes could barely stay opened and it hurt to breath, but even among that devastation, she felt happy, suddenly alive. It took months before it was possible to walk normally again on the ruins of the past in what was the new world, before the air was just too hot, but breathable, spokeman of a neverending summer.
It was September, maybe October, she doesn't clearly remember when a pair of scared eyes locked with hers, framed by a pale face, marked by fatigue, fear and loneliness. Clarke got close with caution and spoke through gestures before dragging the little natblida to her chest, breathing, for the first time again, a human breath, touching, for the first time again, a human body, and listening, for the first time again, to a human heartbeat scanning the silence that had surrounded her for so long.
It's hot, that morning.
It's an ordinary morning, of an ordinary day.
Clarke Griffin takes the radio she couldn't fix into her hand and heads it to the sky, to the space. She leaves the rifle on a rock nearby, reading on its side the names of those they had lost in order to remind of herself who she was and who she has become, in order to remember what she has to protect.
She clears her voice before pressing a dark botton, sits on a fallen trunk, taken from life like everything else, as she begins to talk.
It has been two years since a nuclear apocalypse known as Praimfaya has destroyed the planet, letting her live just because of the color of her blood, but everything still resembles that day when her eyes met the death way coming and the only thought that calmed her down was knowing they were safe, they were alive somewhere lost in the universe.
"Bellamy, if you can hear me, you're alive" she stops, as to gain strenght.
"I'm alive too. But you'll probably never know that. It's three years more till Earth will be safe to come back, but I'm not sure I'll be able to resist that long. It's hot, you know. And I'm scared, sometimes I'm just so scared I'm not sure if I will be able to win my fears. You know, Bellamy, I still remember that day you cried in the night "Whatever the hell we want" , I clearly remember your expression back then and the one you had the last time I've seen you and they were so different, Bellamy, you were so different, I'm sure that over there, wherever you are, you will be ok. Everyone is going to be ok"
She breaths heavily before going on.
"Sometimes I wish I were able to see the stars, I would like to see you sparkle in the night and wish over you while you disappear like a shoothing star over the horizon. I have something to wish for, now, even though this cloud doesn't seem willing to fade away any soon".
"I'm here, anyway"
"Not that I could go somewhere else" she laughs, while her eyes begins to get teary.
"I miss you, Bellamy, I miss you so much".
