Once upon a time
2. the human
It was a boring morning, that morning. The sky was red and the weather was hot while they walked through the ruins of the past searching for anything that could remind of life; either a green spot or a blue pound would have been so precious, but neither of them could be found on that devastated land.
They were hunting, seeking for fortune among the unluckiest scenery Earth had ever hosted and Madi was hungry, the insects they had eaten the night before still in her memory, disgusting as anything. But it was food, at least, it was something.
She was playing, jumping on rocks and sliding under fallen trees, complaining at the same time for the roughness the world was treating them with. Clarke could neither scold her nor disagree with her as she was just an 8-years-old kid ripped from her family and left alone in a new era, with nobody to look after her, nobody to protect her. She had been strong enough to survive, but not strong enough to get away without scars and her demons were haunting her every night. She was just a kid, in the end. A lucky one, a good one.
"Tell me a story about the guys that fell from the sky" she said, suddenly.
"The guys who fought the world and inherited the planet before being forced to come back to space again" she added.
Clarke was surprised at her request, trying to discover were she had been hiding and after founding her behind a big stone wearing a playful smile, she couldn't help but begin with the narration.
"Today's story is about a girl" she started, hearing her joy at the revelation of the female protagonist. "A girl with small eyes and an enchanted smile, with the strenght of an army and the kindness of a child. She was a soldier, but she was a woman, too.
Octavia from Skaikru they used to call her, but it wasn't entirely correct as she didn't actually belong only to us: she belonged everywhere."
Madi was gettier happier as the thought of food was slightly disappearing into the back of her mind, replaced by the excitment of knowing how the story would have continued.
"You know, back to when we used to live in the sky, our spaceship wasn't too big and the food wasn't too much so it was decided that every family could only have one kid. It was for the sake of everyone, but it happened that she wasn't alone. She had a brother. Actually her brother had her as she was the second one born and because of that she had to live for sixteen years under the pavement of their room".
"That's more than twice my age!" Madi screamed, "That's impossible, how could she even breath?"
"Trust me my little natblida, she could. She was very strong, remember? Anyway one day a guard with a black uniform and a rifle in his hand discovered her and she was imprisoned, trapped in a room along with other delinquents before being sent here to live – or to die."
"She was one of the hundred then!"
"She was!"
"And you were one of them too, weren't you?"
"I was, yes. And we came here together, that's when I've met her for the first time. She was actually the one who managed to touch the ground for the first time in years. She was the first one breathing a radioactive-supposed-air, feeling the sun shining on her after ages of artificial nature"
She stopped to talk for a moment, remembering that first day on Earth.
Stop! The air could be tossic.
If it is, we are all dead anyway.
And it wasn't. Luckly, it wasn't.
"And then?"
"Then she fell in love"
"With the joker?"
"No" she smiled, "No, not with the joker. Even though they kissed once!" she smirked. "She fell in love with a grounder. An extremely kind one who had saved her life even before knowing who she truly was. His name was Lincoln. Lincoln the grounder who had a secret diary full of sketches, a box full of magic potions and a heart full of love. And they loved each other a lot, maybe too much for a world were love was considered a weakness. They even tried to make our clans allies, but when they failed they understood there was no hope left. He suggested that they had better escaped together, but she felt she had responsabilities as she couldn't think of leaving us alone and chose blood over love."
"Blood over love?"
"She chose us, leaving her lovest one behind"
"And then?"
"Then Mount Weather happened, again. He was captured"
"And did they used him for his blood?"
"No, they didn't. He was too strong for that, so they had to put him into another project. It was called Cerbero project, from the mythologic three-headed dog, and God only knows the pain he went through".
She waited a moment before carrying on with the story.
"He became a reaper and forgot about everything that wasn't a dose of his drugs. He couldn't even recognise his loved one. Luckily, after not few difficulties, we managed to bring him back from what was a limbo between life and death. And they were in love even more than before. Soon after Octavia sided with the grounders, becoming the pupil of one of their leaders, but Lincoln wanted to stay with us in order to show people that we could cooperate, to show them that we could really become one crew. He still believed in the dream of humanity being one big family. As I told you, he had a really big heart"
"And then?"
"Then a man with idealistic and unpractical dreams came" she stopped. Then carried on with the story, looking somewhere into the ruins.
"And death came with him. So many people left this world because of his hands and Lincoln was one of them. He sacrificed himself trying to save his people. He was a hero, but for Octavia he was dead. And she was dead too. She suffered the sorrows of thousands seeing his excecution, seeing his blood in rivers on the ground, his eyes searching for her through the woods hoping to meet again, one day, when all this human selfness would have been overcome."
She looked at the tears in Madi's eyes, going on.
"Then she let all the anger she was feeling explode and became a warrior nobody could fight, nobody could escape. She won a conclave that declared her the commander of the thirteen clans and won the bunker that managed to save twelve thousand people from the Praimfaya"
"She was the hero, the one who saved the world, wasn't she?"
"She was one of the heroes" she agreed "She was a warrior, a grounder, she was the one that warned us about the arrival of the Ice nation risking her life and letting us prepare a counterattack; she was the one that discovered the magic of bioluminescent butterflies back when the world still seemed the so long hidden heaven we were dreaming about".
She paused for some moments.
"This is the story, my little natblida, of the one who taught us how to be human".