When Bellamy and Clarke entered that bunker and walked by the mummified body and Bellamy made his comment, I got this in to my head, of what it could have been like to have lived trough the war on the ground, and what it could have been like to die there. Just a short thing, not related to the present storyline, but is all set during the war.
I apologise in advance if i am teh suck, English isn't my first language and I've never posted a fic before, so please be kind. Although any constructive criticism is of course welcome.
Also thanks to S.
The silence was the worst.
I never thought I'd hear anything more terrifying as the screams of the dying, of the bombs falling, of civilisation falling apart. But I was wrong.
The last few weeks there has been nothing. Absolutely nothing. Only silence, and I understood why. It was over. Everything was over. Humanity was no more. As incomprehensible as the thought was to me, I understood with full clarity that we had torn down our own civilization, brick by brick. Bomb by bomb. And here I am, in the remnants of what was once a great nation. In the silence of what is left behind.
I have been stuck inside this shelter for weeks now, not daring to go outside of fear of the radiation, knowing that staying is going to starve me to death. At first I waited for more, more survivors who were looking for shelter who would be making their way here, but no one came. As the weeks past, hope of others making it here dwindled, and now the realisation of what that means is as haunting as the silence..
There is nothing left. No one left. We destroyed it all.
In the end it wasn't even our pride that killed us, I refuse to believe that. It was sheer lust for destruction. No one could have done what we did and say it was for any other reason than wanting it all to end. It was a war with no victors, and an end without survivors. There was nothing to feel pride over, no causes to stand up for, no nations to believe in.
As the silence grew, I guess it gave me time to reflect. I had once been just one of many. Living my life, going to work every morning, coming home to my family, going out with my friends. I just wanted a good life, I guess I was just one sheep in the heard as they'd call it, but I was a happy sheep. Content.
I knew people disagreed, fought for what they believed in. Some of my friends would argue about it around me and I used to laugh and say it must be nice to believe so strongly in something that you're willing to give up comfort to fight it. I guess I thought I was more of a live and let live type, as naive as it sounds to me today. Now I wish more had believed even stronger, in us, in humanity, in being better, being more. Saying no, not accepting the escalating violence, stood up. But no one understood how bad it would eventually turn out. In the early days. No one expected this. Just another conflict, it will pass. I guess eventually we see so much conflict we become passive and just let it happens. Statistics on the news.
The ones who stood up and said no were quickly silenced, they should be proud of their country, they said, they should let us spread our democary, our own personal brand of freedom. I thought of this poem I read in high school, the white mans burden, how it reflected on us and our own ignorance. I though that it was this that was the cause of our own ruin. I guess in a way it was pride too. If pride have made you blind to anything but what you can tear down as long as it doesn't look exactly like you.
In the end I guess none of it mattered though. In the end, the causes or the nations didn't matter as the world burned to ashes, leaving nothing but this never ending silence, the sound of absolutely nothing.
As the weeks passed and my hope dwindled, so did my rations. I had come here because I knew there would be a storage here, and it was built to withstand the bombs. We all knew where places like this were now. It was a matter of survival. I had made my way here trough the terrain of hope of finding resources and maybe even other survivors. Once I got here it was already more or less empty and not a single living soul to be seen. I found some rations and blankets, but mostly I found weapons. Littered over the place, as a nagging reminder of what we had become in those last days.
There had been two more blasts near enough for me to hear them before the silence fell, I didn't even know what they were trying to do with those, there was nothing left to destroy. I was surprised anyone was even alive to set them off.
After that it was nothing. The weeks passed, and every day I went to the entrance. Well, I say day, but really it could have been any time. I had no way of knowing, in the pale light of the bunker there was no day or night, it was this never ending dusk. But yet I made my way there, I sat in the stairs, waiting, listening. Hoping.
My last rations have been gone for what must have been a little bit over a week now, and the last water some days ago. At first the hunger was like a never ending burning ache but as the days went by it numbed down and no all I feel is exhaustion. My body is weakening and I know it's over soon. Yet I sit at the stairs in a last desperate hope for a rescue I know will never come. No one will ever see this miserable, dank bunker again, my skin will never feel the warmth of the sun, I will never again hear hear the sounds of the living. This place will be my tomb, yet another unmarked grave in the remnants of our fallen world.
The sound of my labored breath is in a way reassuring because at least in the end, there is something. I'd laugh at the irony of that thought if I wasn't too exhausted to even make a sound.
My eyelids are growing more and more heavy as I stare down the empty stairs in front of me, my body heavy against the railing, the situation not lost at. Here I am, one of the last of humanity, hidden beneath the ground to try to survive ourselves, starving in a bunker meant to save us and as it turns out it would be my death.
Hell of a place to die, I think, my minds attempt to make light of the inevitable, before the darkness takes me, and then the silence is complete.