Bare feet hit the ground at a sprint as Elyza tore through the deserted city streets in the early morning light. There were a few walkers scattered throughout the alleyways that she passed, and she knew that they would soon join the group that was already following her, drawn to the loud noises they were making in her pursuit. Her breathing came out in hard but steady breaths as she ran. She could see the expanse of the ocean ahead of her and the rocky cliff face that separated her from the safety that it harbored. She quickly considered her options. She knew it would be dangerous, but she also knew that risks were necessary in order to survive - her instincts demanded bravery.

With a burst of strength, she launched herself over the edge of the rocky bank. Her stomach flew up into her throat as the ground dropped out from under her and gravity pulled her down. The sand felt more like cement when she landed, her feet smashing into the granular surface. Her left ankle rolled sickeningly, causing her to audibly wince, but she pushed forward, hell-bent on reaching the water.

She limped heavily as she fought her way through the icy ocean waves that crashed around her. She barely noticed the way the salty water splashed up to sting at her eyes and sear the scrapes that decorated her skin. Her heart pounded in her chest as it pumped adrenaline through her entire system, igniting every cell in her body. The only thought in her mind was to survive. If she could just get out past the surf break, the horde of walkers following her wouldn't be able reach her.

She heard groans and hissing and splashing behind her and knew that they were too close. Forcefully, she threw herself headfirst into the crest of a breaking wave. She fought helplessly against the current as the force of it pushed her back toward the shore, and her right foot came into contact with something solid. She knew what it was. Fear spiked in her core and she kicked frantically, ignoring the sharp pain that shot through her left foot. With one, desperate push, she launched herself off of the walker's body just as the undertow began to pull her back out. She felt it's dead fingers scrape across her foot, and then she was free.

She kept up her frantic kicking under the water until her lungs felt like they were about to burst. She came up for air, spluttering and gasping for breath. Looking back at the shore, she saw what looked like a group of nearly fifteen walkers wading through the rough water. Relief washed through her like the ocean itself as she watched them get thrown by the crashing swells, unable to break through the waves.

With one hand, she reached up and pushed a few strands of wet, blonde hair out of her face and tried to take a deep breath to steady herself. She began to swim further out from the shore, but stopped almost immediately as the excruciating pain in her ankle flared up, causing her to clench her jaw and grimace. It was impossible to ignore now that the adrenaline was wearing off.

She looked up and down the shoreline, scanning it for any signs of obvious life. A few walkers were scattered along the beach, slowly making their way toward the horde that had been chasing her. She didn't see any people. There was no one running, no one carrying weapons or tools, no one walking with purpose and cautiously glancing over their shoulder - there were no signs of the living.

She sighed and let her head fall back slightly as her stomach dropped in disappointment. It was quickly followed by anger, though, as she thought about the way that her safe house had been raided during the night. She had been living in a large house on a hill that she and a group of eleven other people had transformed into their very own, fortified camp. They had been residing there for months, sheltered from the chaos of the streets outside, surviving together, before they were attacked, not by walkers, but by the fucking military.

She allowed herself only a moment to worry about her friends before she pushed it all down and forced herself to focus. She needed to make a plan. She needed to survive.

She scanned the shore again, looking for a safe place to swim back to land. Finding nothing promising, she turned in a full circle, taking in the endless expanse of the ocean on the western horizon. She did a double take, noticing a black dot about twenty degrees off the shoreline to the north, and felt a spark of hope flicker in her chest. If it were a boat, she could rest there and take some time to come up with a real plan to get back to shore and find her people. Determined, she knit her brows together and began to swim, using only her arms and her uninjured leg to propel herself forward.

"I could get use to this," Alycia said with a sigh as she smiled up at the clear blue sky, letting the warmth of the sun seep through her skin and warm her to her core. She was sprawled out on the deck of Victor's enormous luxury yacht with sunglasses on and the steady rhythm of music streaming though a single earbud in her right ear. The sun was warm on her skin, and for the first time in what felt like years, she was almost able to pretend that the world hadn't broken to pieces and collapsed into rubble around her.

"I'd rather not." Chris's voice shattered her reverie. She hadn't realized she wasn't alone. It irked her enough for a scowl to cross her lips.

"Buzz kill," she grumbled.

She sat up and looked at him, pushing her sunglasses up to rest on top of her head. He was facing away from her, leaning against the railing of the deck with one of his elbows propped up on it as he held his video camera out in front of him. He never went anywhere without that thing.

"What are you doing?" She asked, not caring enough to hide her annoyance.

"Documenting," he told her.

Alicia stood up with an exasperated sigh and walked over to him. Reaching for the camera, Chris tentatively let her take it out of his hands. She slid her fingers through the strap and hit the record button.

"What's the point?" She asked him, genuinely curious. She truly did not see the point of it. "Technology is failing. Even if someone were to find your camera in the bound-to-be-shitty, post-apocalyptic future, they wouldn't have anything to play your videos on. So what's the point?"

"What makes you think I do it for anyone else?" He countered, and his response took Alicia by surprise. She turned to look at him with confusion clearly written on her face. Brows knit together, she lifted her chin slightly and she waited for him to elaborate; she knew it was a rhetorical question.

"Look," he went on, "if someone does find this in the future and there's even a sliver of a chance that they'll find some way to play my videos, then it's all worth it. A first hand account of how the apocalypse went down could be invaluable. I don't need to explain that to you - I know you know that - but even if I knew for a fact that there was no chance that anyone else would ever watch these, I would still do it. I'd do it for myself. Talking things out in front of the camera, documenting my experiences and describing all of this crazy, senseless shit- it's the only way that I can know that it's real - that this world isn't just some never-ending nightmare that I could eventually wake up from. It's the only way that I can process any of it."

He released a long breath and let his shoulders slump forward, becoming the perfect picture of exhaustion. She could see it in his countenance and in his posture and she could hear it in his words, and she understood. She was exhausted too; they all were - physically and mentally.

"Hell," he went on after a moment, voice tight as if he had to force the words out of his throat. "I still can't process it. I mean… my mom… I just- I can't-"

He choked on his words and reached a hand up to pinch at the bridge of his nose before turning away from Alicia and the camera. Both of his elbows rested on the balcony and his face was pressed into his open palms, hiding his eyes.

Alicia reached up and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. She didn't say anything because there was nothing to say. Shit happened and life sucked, and there was nothing fair about it.

They stayed that way for a long time, with no sounds but those of the ocean beneath them. It must've been at least fifteen minutes before Alicia realized that the camera was still in her hands and it was still recording. She pulled it up in front of her face and zoomed in to the shore, taking in the crumbling landscape of the city that she use to call home. It broke her heart to see it like this - torn apart and dead.

Suddenly, something off of the shore caught her eye and she inhaled sharply.

"Chris, look at this," she said, hitting him on the shoulder and making him scowl at her.

"What?" He leaned over to look at the camera. Alicia zoomed in closer and glanced at him. She watched as his eyes practically doubled in size.

"Is that one of them?" He asked, and she could hear the fear beneath his words.

"I don't think so," she said. "I'm pretty sure the dead can't swim."

He nodded silently and visibly swallowed.

"We need to tell the others. Go get my dad," he told her, throwing her a quick glance.

Despite her displeasure at being told what to do, she hurried towards the cabin doors.

"Mom!" She called out loudly as soon as she entered the room. "Travis!"

"Woah, why are you yelling?"

Nick squinted up at her from where he was laying, sprawled out on a sofa. He looked as miserable as a stoner in withdrawal, which wasn't surprising since that's exactly what he was.

"Where's mom?" She snapped, ignoring his question and moving past him.

"Lower deck," came a nonchalant voice to her left. Alicia glanced over and saw Victor standing by the bar, casually sipping a drink that he had poured for himself.

"Seriously, what's going on?" Nick asked, sitting up and rubbing a hand over one of his eyes.

"We found someone," she shot at him over her shoulder before running down a flight of stairs.

"Interesting," she heard Victor say curiously as she reached the bottom of the stairs, quickly followed by Nick's loud exclamation of, "What?"

She chose to ignore them both, but heard their footsteps above her, most likely heading out to the deck to see for themselves.

"Mom!" She called out again, as loudly as she could.

"Alicia?" A muffled voice came from behind a closed door. It swung open a moment later and Travis stepped out, shirt unbuttoned and hair ruffled, closely followed by her mother. Both looked concerned.

"Oh god, seriously?" Alicia cringed both inwardly and outwardly as she realized what they must've been doing in the privacy of their bedroom.

"What's wrong?" Travis asked.

"There's someone in the water," she told them, wasting no time. "I saw them through Chris's camera up on the top deck."

The look on both of their faces shifted quickly from concern to surprise.

"Show me," Travis said, moving past her quickly and hurrying up the stairs.

"It's not a…" Madison let her question trail off, "is it?"

"No, Mom. We're safe here," Alicia reassured her. "Whoever it is, they're definitely alive, and we need to help them."

Exhaustion weighed down on every bone in Elyza's body, like lead weights dragging her down beneath the surface of the water. Her injuries were hitting her full force, and the pain of them had her teetering on the edge of consciousness. She fought with every ounce of her strength to stay awake, to stay above water, to stay alive, but she was failing. Her vision was narrowing, black seeping in around the edges and threatening to eclipse her. Salt water burned in her lungs, making her cough violently, which only caused more of the searing liquid to force its way in.

She wasn't naive - she knew that the thing she felt slowly consuming her was the onset of death - but she kept up her futile fight with unwavering determination.

Something firm suddenly tightened around her upper arm and tugged at her. She barely registered what was happening as her head broke the surface of the water and she fought to breathe.

"Grab her other arm!" A voice shouted out.

Her vision was blurry and fading fast, and just as she felt something grasp her other arm, a rolling wave came up around her face. She coughed in an impossibly large breath of ocean water that flooded her lungs, and everything went black.

Alicia, Nick and Chris stood side-by-side, each one pressed up against the railing on the upper deck of the yacht. All three of them were staring anxiously at the small screen of the camera, watching the adults pull a body into the small, inflatable boat. They strained their eyes, trying their best to make out more of what was happening, but it was too far away for the little camera to show anything in detail.

Alicia let out an irritated sigh. She was still sufficiently annoyed about not being allowed to go out in the boat with her mother, Travis and Victor, especially since she was the first one to catch the 'man overboard'.

"I can barely see anything on that screen," she told her brothers, turning away from the camera in Chris's hand. "I'm going back down to wait for them on the lower deck."

She barely had to wait five minutes until the boat was within hearing distance. She heard her brothers' footsteps thumping down the stairs behind her, but didn't turn to look at them.

"Tie us up," Victor called out to them, throwing a rope out to Nick as the boat bumped up against the side of the yacht. Chris reached out and grabbed the other rope at the boat's bow, steadying it enough for the three adults to step out onto the deck.

Travis crouched down, and when he stood back up, he had a girl in his arms. Her blond hair stuck to the sides of her face and fell down behind her, soaking wet and dripping icy sea water. Her clothes were waterlogged, and clung to her tightly. She looked like she'd been through hell. She had deep scrapes on her cheek and chin and cuts scattered across all of the visible parts of her skin. The worst of her injuries, by far, was the girl's left ankle. It was swollen to the size of a softball and covered in an angry-looking, multi-colored bruise. The sight of it made her cringe in sympathy.

Travis stepped off the boat and moved towards the stairs that led to the cabin. Nick ran up ahead of him and held the door open.

"Is she-?"

"She's alive," Madison cut off his question, "just unconscious. We need to warm her up. Alicia, will you go find something dry for her to wear? She looks about the same size as you."

"Yeah, sure." Alicia hurried off towards her room and grabbed a pair of purple sweatpants, a simple white t-shirt, and a fuzzy gray sweater, along with some underwear and fleece socks. They were the warmest clothes she had with her.

She walked out into the cabin and found everyone crowded around the unconscious girl who was laying on top of a light gray sectional. She could hear them whispering under their breath.

"Are you sure she isn't infected?" One of them asked.

"No, we'll have to check her out for bite marks," her mother's voice answered.

"And what if she is?"

"Then we can't let her stay here," Travis whispered back.

"We can't just throw her back out into the ocean."

"We can't risk any of us getting sick. You know that."

"So what, you would be okay with just leaving her to die?"

"Well wh-"

"How about we give her some air," Alicia suggested hotly, not bothering to lower her voice and effectively cutting off the discussion. She walked up to her mother and handed Madison the pile of clothes.

"You're right," her mom agreed, turning to Travis. "Why don't you go up and wait for us on the upper deck while we get her changed."

Travis nodded.

"Don't forget to check for bite marks," he reminded her before turning to leave. "Everybody out, let's go."

He ushered everyone out of the lower cabin with him, but when Alicia moved to follow, her mom stopped her quickly with a hand on her arm.

"I'm going to need your help," Madison said as Alicia turned back towards her. She put the pile of clothes down on the side table and bent over the unconscious girl. "Help me get her out of these wet clothes?"

"Oh," Alicia said, hesitantly. "Okay."

She walked back and bent over the girl beside her mother. It took both of them working together to peel off her skin-tight black jeans, and Alicia was grateful that the girl was unconscious as she squeezed her swollen ankle through the fabric.

She let her mom take off the blonde's underwear, feeling uneasy about seeing the girl naked without her permission. She reached for her shoulders and pulled her up into a sitting position in an effort to get her out of her leather jacket. The material was stiff and inflexible, which made things difficult, but she eventually managed to free her of it.

After tossing the jacket aside, she reached for the hem of her shirt and hiked it up her stomach, revealing another deep purple bruise painted across her ribs. She ran her fingers over it delicately before taking one arm at a time and pushing them through the shirt sleeves. Alicia breath caught in her throat and she blushed a deep shade of red when the girl's second arm was freed and she realized that the blonde wasn't wearing a bra. She blinked rapidly and tried to look anywhere but at the girl's chest. Her eyes flashed over soft looking skin marred with wounds in various stages of the healing process. She had to fight back the urge to reach out and touch her injuries - to soothe them. It surprised her to no end. She wasn't one to care about strangers she'd never met, but for whatever reason, Alicia really didn't like seeing this particular girl hurt.

Clearing her throat, she pulled at the girls shoulders and sat her up again in order to slip the wet shirt up over her head. The close proximity made her heart race. As she reached around the girl, she noticed the curving lines of a looping tattoo on the back of her neck. Alicia's eyes grew wide at the sight of the infinity sign - the same symbol that she always found herself sketching in the margins of her notebooks during class. She wanted nothing more than to take the time to look at it, to trace it, but she knew that she couldn't - that she shouldn't. So instead, she grabbed the dry shirt beside her and quickly fit the girl into it.

Foregoing the sweater, she lay the girl back down and reached up to brush a few stray strands of hair out of her eyes. She ran her fingers down to the very ends of her damp, blonde hair and rolled it between her fingers. Even wet, she could tell that her hair was a beautiful shade of champagne gold.

When she looked back up at the girl's face, Alicia gasped, her jaw dropping slightly in shock. Blurry eyes blinked up at her, as blue as the sky above them and as bright as the summer sun. They held her for a moment and then a smirk spread across the blonde's lips. All Alicia could do was stare at her, stunned. She was completely at the mercy of those eyes and that smirk, trapped like a prisoner in her gaze. Then the girl spoke with a voice as coarse as gravel after nearly drowning.

"You were right," she coughed.

That was all she said before she blinked her glassy eyes a few more times and seemingly fell back into unconsciousness.

"Did she just say something?" Madison asked loudly, obviously surprised as well. "Is she awake?"

Alicia mouth went dry, but she forced herself to swallow down the knot that had built up in her throat.

"She's Australian," was all she could think to say.

"What?" Her mother asked, confused. "Alicia, what did she say?"

It took a moment for Alicia to collect herself enough to respond.

"It was nothing, Mom. She wasn't making any sense," she told her, finally tearing her eyes off of the blonde to turn towards her mother and throw her an exasperated look. "All she said was 'you were right' and then passed out again. She was probably just hallucinating."

"Hmm," was all that Madison said in response. The woman stood up and walked around to the other side of Alicia, near the blonde's head.

"Did you see any bite marks?" Her mom asked.

"No, just a lot of cuts and bruises. You?"

"Same."

There was silence for a moment as they both stared at the girl with identical looks of curiosity and confusion.

"What do you think happened to her, Mom?"

"I don't know, but we're going to find out as soon as she wakes up. Help me get her into a bed?"

Alicia nodded. "She can take mine. I'll wait in there until she's conscious again."

"Okay," Madison agreed. "I'll get her arms and you get her legs."

Alicia moved down to the girls thighs and slid her hands under her legs. Together, the women lifted the girl and carried her down the hall and through the door to Alicia's room. They gently laid her down on the bed and shifted her into the center of it before covering her with a soft blanket.

"Alright hun, come get us when she wakes up. Understand?"

Alicia nodded, walking over to the shelf by the bed and scanning the few books that were stacked there. She smiled with satisfaction as she found The Giver and quickly pulled it out and ruffled through its pages.

"I mean it, Alicia. As soon as she's awake, you need to tell us."

"Okay, Mom, I get it," she said, waving her mother out of the room with irritation.

As soon as the door closed, Alicia collapsed into the chair by the bed and stared at the blonde-haired girl who was asleep in her bed. She completely forgot about the book in her hand as her mind filled with the image of those beautiful, blue eyes and that devilish smirk.

"Australian…" she said to absent-mindedly, completely oblivious to the way she was smiling to herself at the memory of the girl's words. "How the hell did you end up here?"

A/N: This is my first attempt at writing fanfiction, so go easy on me. I couldn't help but jump on the Elyza Lex bandwagon after we lost Lexa in episode 7 of The 100 :'(. I'm a big fan of post-apocalyptic fiction though, and I think there's a lot of potential for some really awesome stories in this crossover universe. If I don't get much of a response to this, I might not continue it, so let me know if you want me to keep going. Feel free to message me on tumblr if you have any suggestions or questions or anything else. url: searching4thesun