I feel the sun on my face. I see trees all around me. The scent of wildflowers on a breeze. It's so beautiful…
In this moment, I'm not stranded in an apocalypse.
It's been 97 years since the Mount Weather Research Institute started experimenting with drugs that shut down portions of the human brain, leaving a person mindless, violent, and cannibalistic. 3 years ago, a strain of the drug managed to mix itself with a common airborne virus, developing into a deadly disease that rots the body and shuts down the mind. Thousands were infected, leaving the earth simmering with death and destruction.
Fortunately, there were survivors…
It wasn't meant to be this way.
Humans didn't kill humans anymore. The undead tried to kill humans, and the humans killed the undead. There just weren't enough people around to waste time fighting them; you either banded together or went your own way. You certainly didn't kill your friends.
But there Clarke stood, knife shining with red, human blood, so different than the murky rotting muck that came out of the zombies. Blood that should never have been spilled, especially not by the girl Raven had considered her best friend.
Finn's blood.
Raven doesn't even remember what happened after that. She dimly recalls screaming, yelling, sobbing; someone's hands (Bellamy's?) holding her back; Clarke's face, pain and guilt playing across the blonde's features. But it's all foggy and distant, like looking at a photograph full of faded details.
The only thing that truly stands out from that night is the knife in Clarke's hand, too-red human blood running down her fingers and dripping off of the blade. Clarke should have just stabbed Raven too and gotten it over with, but instead all that was offered was muttered excuses and apologies. He was infected. He had wanted it this way. You wouldn't want him to end up as a zombie, Raven, you know you wouldn't. It had to be this way.
They didn't—and still don't—mean anything. All that matters is the knife. All that matters is Finn's blood staining Clarke's hand and blade.
"Have you noticed anything strange about Raven?" Octavia asks in a low voice, dark eyes meeting Bellamy's own with typical Blake intensity.
"You mean because of Finn?" Bellamy asks, gaze moving back and forth between his sister and the window he's currently patching up. Glass panes are dangerous these days, unless reinforced with metal bars too close together for undead hands to slip through, which is what he's doing now. "Life is hard, O." Finn isn't the first person they've lost. Charlotte, Wells, Sterling… Bellamy tries not to think too hard about the long list of the dead. Their band of survivors had started at 100, and had since fallen to something in the 40s.
"No." Octavia frowns. She doesn't want to bring this up—who would?—but she also feels duty-bound to her friends. Sometimes, being a warrior means making hard decisions. Especially if you're an observant warrior. "She's…I don't know, Bel. She doesn't look good. I…I think she might be infected."
"Clarke took care of that." Bellamy screws in another metal bar, attaching it to the window frame. Raven had been shot in the spine, and was suffering the after-effects of that with the loss of the use of one leg. But the bullet was out now, and Clarke had checked the wound repeatedly for infections, finally giving Raven the all-clear.
"I mean really infected, Bellamy."
Octavia's tone causes him to look up, meeting his sister's eyes once more. The graveness of her expression—and the pain behind it—says what she's been reluctantly trying to, and Bellamy connects the unpleasant dots. He doesn't know what to say at first, and when he does finally speak, his voice is somewhere between a sigh and a hiss.
"Shit."
It's getting harder and harder to think. Raven tries to focus on what she's doing—Jasper found an old CB radio, the kind truckers used to talk to each other with, and she's trying to rig it up so that they can broadcast messages through any radio that still has batteries. But she can't quite manage to concentrate. It used to be so easy: she would start working on something and all the little pieces would click together in her mind, telling her fingers what to do.
But lately, it feels like trying to catch fog with bare hands. Totally impossible, and incredibly frustrating.
Finally, Raven drops the radio onto her workbench, cradling her head in her hands. She can feel a headache coming on; she seems to be getting more and more of them lately.
Dull images flash through her head. Despite the unclear memories, that night is the only thing she can concentrate on. Clarke's pained expression. Bellamy's arms around her shoulders. Hot tears on her cheeks. Someone shouting—herself, probably.
And the knife in Clarke's hand, slick and red with Finn's blood. A bolt of anger goes through Raven, cutting through the sorrow and making her headache worse.
That keeps happening lately, too. She's been angry in the past, but not like this. This is a raw, insane anger that makes her want to—to kill something. To grab someone and dig her fingernails into their skin, to make them hurt like she's hurting—
And then it passes, as quickly as it came, and Raven is left with an aching heart, an aching head, and a broken radio.
Bellamy speaks to Clarke quietly, repeating what Octavia told him. His co-leader doesn't cry—she's seen too much in the past years to do that anymore. And if Bellamy is right, crying won't solve anything anyway.
She feels like it, though. She feels like curling up into a ball and sobbing until everything is washed away. No more death, no more sorrow. No more killing. But she shakes away the urge, burying it deep within herself. Clarke's a leader, and sometimes leaders have to do hard things.
When she sees Raven, she knows that what Bellamy told her is true. She'd been avoiding the mechanic since Finn's death, and didn't notice the steady decline the other girl's obviously been in.
Raven's face is creased with annoyance as she fiddles and tinkers with a jumble of plastic, metal, and wires. A sheen of sweat covers her body, and her skin is paler than Clarke's ever seen it before. Her eyes are rimmed red and have deep circles beneath them, and her fingertips, as she twists strands of wire together, are a disturbing bruised-purple color.
"Raven," Clarke says, and the brunette looks up.
"What do you want?" comes the cold response.
"I need to look at your back."
Raven doesn't answer immediately. She's still upset at Clarke, for obvious reasons. But deep down, she trusts the blonde girl, and so she finally nods, lifting up the ratty blue tank top she's wearing enough to reveal the shiny red scar on her back.
To Clarke's surprise, the wound looks fine. Despite leaving a nasty scar and robbing Raven of a leg, it's healed better than she'd expected. No infections spread across Raven's skin, no discolored skin, no signs of the virus entering her body through the bullet wound. Clarke's eyebrows crease in a frown, and she runs her eyes across Raven's form, looking for anything else that could indicate something wrong.
And then she sees it. The tiniest of cuts, on the back of Raven's arm, an angry red color and crusted with infection. Thin black lines travel from it beneath the girl's skin: infection in her bloodstream.
Damn it. Damn it. Life isn't fair. First Finn, and now Raven. Clarke closes her eyes, biting her lip to keep tears from coming. She's a leader. Leaders don't cry, leaders are strong, she has to be strong for Raven and Bellamy and Octavia and everyone else in the camp of teenage survivors.
When Clarke speaks, she's surprised at the calmness of her own voice. "Raven, there's a cut on your shoulder."
"A cut?" Raven repeats, frowning and uncertain.
"It's…infected." Clarke has to force the words from her lips. Both girls know exactly what kind of 'infected' Clarke means, and the words hang in silence, before Clarke finally speaks again. "I'm so sorry, Raven."
"It isn't your fault." Raven's voice sounds detached, almost robotic. She's not looking at Clarke anymore, staring instead at the chunk of radio sitting on the workbench.
"I'm sorry," Clarke says again. Sorrow doesn't help, but there's nothing else to say.
It wasn't meant to be this way.
Humans didn't kill humans anymore. The undead tried to kill humans, and the humans killed the undead. There just weren't enough people around to waste time fighting them; you either banded together or went your own way. You certainly didn't kill your friends.
But there Clarke stands, knife shining with red, human blood, so different than the murky rotting muck that came out of the zombies. Blood that should never have been spilled—Raven's blood. It trails down Clarke's fingers, down the silver blade of the knife, and drips onto the ground, where it soaks into the cold dirt to mingle with Finn's, together again at last.
Clarke cries now, and Bellamy holds her.