Chapter Text
"Loving you was breathing
but the breath disappearing
before it filled my lungs"
when it goes to soon - rupi kaur
It's an afternoon after a night of rain and the forest is silent. Clarke can hear the last drops falling from the trees in the distance while she's laying on the hood of the rover with eyes closed, enjoying the peace. Sometimes she hears birds singing, those strange radioactive birds that became normal for her, and there are also her favorite moments, when the rustling of leaves announces the wind is coming, just before she feels the fresh air on her skin.
Only when the silence becomes too silent, Clarke opens her eyes, her brain following just one second later and she sits so fast the drawing on her lap falls to the ground.
"Shit," she murmurs, jumping to the ground and picking it up again. Clarke cleans it and folds the yellow paper carefully, but still not as careful as the old paper demands because her mind is already elsewhere.
On the silence.
On the trees.
"Maddie?" she calls.
The silence now has a darkness in it, expanding between the trees as far as she can see, without any sign of the young girl.
Clarke takes her rifle and looks at the map opened on the hood, it's handmade and the drawing stops suddenly. She got distracted by memories she was supposed to avoid. Now it lays there, incomplete, and she doesn't have time for it.
"Maddie?" she calls again, already circling the spot around the car where they are camping. "Where are you?"
Maddie probably is playing around somewhere just distant enough to hear, but this sounds easier said than in reality. Clarke is walking into the woods, the trees surrounding her now have no foliage, they are just gray skeletons twisted over her head, and as she walks, her boots sink into the wet earth. There's no sound. Not even the drops or birds now. Clarke doesn't need to fly away like them to know what is around her: a whole lot of empty vastness. She knows it. They walked around at least a dozen times, everywhere, during the last 6 years. Every direction, there's death. It's just the two of them and some animals made of skin and bones that, just like them, are too stubborn to die.
And they are also very hungry.
Clarke adjusts her grip on the rifle and starts searching for tracks.
"Maddie!" she screams louder, hoping it will scare away anything that may be near, and forces herself to pay attention to the ground.
Any untrained eye would see just black earth, cleaned by the rain, but Clarke isn't anyone. Even if it takes some times circling, she finds the points where the soil is too deep or small mounds forming a trail. Clarke is both angry and relieved that Maddie was so careless in covering her tracks after they spent days training it. Not that anyone was there to find them, but she doesn't like surprises and Clarke is happy with how things are going, she doesn't need to change that.
The pattern leads her into a path deep into the woods until she stops at the top of a slope.
"Maddie?" she calls again.
"Clarke?" this time the girl answers.
If relief was what Clarke felt for finding the tracks, this was an entirely new type of invading peace. The air returned to her lungs and she more stumbled than ran her way down the slope.
"Where are you?"
"Here," the girl says, raising her voice so Clarke can follow it.
She finds the girl with her knees on the mud covered in dirt and still digging. The only part of her clean, miraculously, is the black beanie on her head. Suddenly they are five years back in the past, Clarke walking around the forest, sometimes for hours, just to find a 7 years old girl climbing a tree, or talking to insects on a fallen trunk.
Clarke stops, forehead furrowed, the memory feels like a missing piece, something that she forgot that happened, and didn't remember how or when the girl stopped playing around like a kid. But here they are, and for the 13 years old Maddie that she knows, it's weird.
"I found it," Maddie says, looking up at Clarke with a bright smile and even brighter green eyes.
"You found... what?"
"My symbol." She points to ground before her.
Clarke realizes that beneath all the dirt there's a metal hatch. Maddie leans forward and cleans the dirt off of it until a number 8 appears. Or the symbol of infinity.
"Stay away from it," Clarke says, taking a step back. "You don't know what it is. Leave it there."
Maddie doesn't move. Instead, she pulls her sleeve to show her forearm where the same symbol was marked with ink on her skin.
"It's the same, Clarke. I'm sure of it. This is what my mom asked me to find." Maddie stares at the hatch with resolution.
Yes, Clarke knows the story.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl lost in the woods, she was one of the two last people alive on Earth, but she didn't know about it.
"Excuse me, do you know where I can find it?" The girl showed the tattoo on her skin. "My mother says I'll be safe if I find it." Back then, the black beanie was still too large for her head and used to fell over her eyes.
Clarke didn't have it in her to tell the girl that, even if it existed the place she was looking for was burned to the ground like the rest of the world, now her heritage was just a relic of a lost past. It was a miracle that the kid survived alone still searching. So Clarke offered to help.
It was easy. Maddie was a kid, and she liked to swim when the day was hot and loved soup with eggs. Soon she forgot about it and they fell into their routine traveling around and training. Clarke never expected that one day they'd find a hatch on the ground with the damn symbol.
"Maddie," Clarke says, firmly, in a tone that the girl knows enough to lower her head.
"We found it, Clarke," Maddie insists, but when Clarke offers her hand, the girl takes it.
"Come on, we need to train," Clarke says, pulling her up.
"This is a little door, Clarke. We can open it." Maddie points to the ground and Clarke tries to make her stop moving so she can clean the girl, at least as much as possible. "It's stuck, but maybe we can use one of the grenades?" Maddie says.
"No. Don't even think about it." Clarke shakes her head. "You'll only touch those grenades over my dead body. There's a reason this is locked up and it'll stay like this."
"It's to keep animals away." Maddie forces a smile.
"You're not being funny, kiddo." Clarke cleans one last spot on her cheek and kisses her head. "Now let's go, you'll need to clean yourself properly and we're already late for today."
Maddie lingers, looking back. Clarke takes a deep breath and grabs her chin, making the girl look up.
"What have I told you?"
"My duty comes first," the girl says, gravely, green eyes trained ahead.
"No, not... What." Clarke shakes her head. "I didn't tell you that."
"Well," Maddie says, "this week we read the dictionary and it said that duty, D-U-T-Y, is something you are obligated to do, even if you don't want to, and I think it explains it."
Clarke stops looking at what this little smartass is trying to do.
"Don't even try, you won't win. Actually-" Clarke smiles- "I'm thinking about extra laps today."
Maddie grunts.
"It's unfair!"
Clarke pushes her gently forward, so they can start walking back.
"Welcome to the world," she says, making a broad gesture to the dead trees accompanying their walk.
Maddie crosses her arms.
"Can at least we have stories today?"
"I think we've had enough stories for now, Maddie. We should leave them in the past, where it's supposed to be."
---
The image of the infinity symbol on the half-buried hatch burns on the back of Clarke's mind all day. She's there with Maddie, running their usual miles, going through their fight routine and this day, as if running fast enough she could run away from her mind, they even trained throwing knives. Maddie slept as soon as her head hit her improvised pillow on the back of the car. Clarke, though, was wide awake even when her muscles protested.
When she walks into the woods carrying an ax, she realizes that it was a lost battle since the moment she saw the hatch. She'd have to come back and see it anyway. Not because she hoped they'd find something mystical, but because it's survival and when you've been checking the same old ruins for years, you have to see what a new hatch can bring.
It's easy to find it, even in the dark. Not for everyone, but again, Clarke isn't everyone for a long time now. She walked in dark forests for more nights than she wished. Even this one, a bit far from where they usually go, is familiar for her trained brain after just a couple of days in the area.
The hatch is just as they left earlier. Clarke wonders how this hatch could be here. She finished the last version of her map during the afternoon while Maddie took a shower, but it still doesn't make sense. They are beyond of what used to be Ice Nation territory, too up north, and not even the grounders used to come this far before praimfaya.
She kneels on the ground where Maddie stood and lights it with her flashlight to have a better look. The infinity symbol is there, not just any symbol, the one with four little dots interrupting one of the curves.
Clarke saw it first on a skin, just before she kissed it.
Now Clarke needs to close her eyes and sit on the ground to take a deep breath. Suddenly she feels so tired and old, as if she survived through centuries and whatever was left of her, it was just dust. But she's still here, the weight of the ax becomes heavy on her lap, telling her that she could use it to bury this place forever. It's the easiest solution, maybe even the smartest. But Clarke's life never was easy, and she doesn't even know anymore what smart is.
So it comes back, slowly, the tiny spark of curiosity growing inside her, spreading until it's a wildfire. When Clarke opens her eyes, she has changed, but she's not a different person, she's the one she always has been, the young girl that somehow destroyed the world. And she'll probably do it again.
Maybe, just maybe, you can't escape who you really are.
---
She thought the night was dark until she looked at the black hole on the ground. Now it's too late to come back, and maybe she'll find food there, that's always motivation. So, just in case, Clarke starts by throwing a flare into the hole and pointing the rifle she also brought with her to the shadows.
The flare falls illuminating the ladder until it hits the ground, surprisingly close, and as soon as it touches the floor, a machine starts to hum. Clarke grips the gun tighter, her finger ready on the trigger, but nothing is there besides the pounding sound of her heart. One moment later, slowly, lights turn on illuminating the bottom of the ladder, coming from a tunnel.
"Great," Clarke says to herself, her voice sounds like a whisper in the night, so she repeats louder. "It's great."
Clarke lowers her gun and breath.
"Yes, I'm going to do that," she says, "nothing wrong here. I'll just go underground and..." She stops looking at the ladder and feeling stupid.
If she's being honest, she really doesn't want to do this. She has a gun, and she knows how to use it, she has been training. Theoretically, she's ready. In reality, it has been years since she was anxious about the unknown. She fought and killed animals twice her size, yes, but animals are animals, even the radioactive ones. This shit down there, this is the type of thing that ended the world.
"Okay," Clarke says, even though she hates it now, and adjusts the strap of her rifle to put it on her back and takes her handgun before climbing down. "I'm just not going to die."
Good news: She doesn't die.
Bad news: Well...
When she sees the shelter, she can't believe she was afraid of it. It's just a room with no doors, no windows. There's a stainless steel table at the center. One side looks like a control panel with screens and buttons, all turned off, and right across the entrance there's cabinets and lockers. Clarke goes straight to them. Maybe there's food or anything there. If this place still has energy, it can have anything.
She's wrong. They are all empty except for trash left behind. She decides to take a good look at it anyway. After all, everything is trash left behind these days. She puts the gun on the counter and folds her sleeves, then, carefully, Clarke picks up an old, yellowish cloth and brings it to the light. It's used and dirty with blood, black blood. She looks up to the cabinet. The rest of the trash are open medicine boxes, empty bottles and plastic envelopes.
Clarke doesn't like it.
She looks around again, looking for more details she missed at first. She's surprised to realize that the empty wall actually is covered with a map. It's a printed colorful map, and there are pins on it and scribbles made with a pen. It looks as old as... something from the time Becca was around. Not even in the Ark they had this.
Now what really gets her attention, though, is the girl wearing a beanie standing at the entrance. Clarke feels her heart stop.
"Maddie?" Clarke's hand goes straight to the gun, but she covers the sudden movement as if she just wanted to put the gun in her holster. "What are you doing here?" She asks casually, turning her back to the girl and throwing the cloth inside the cabinet and closing it.
"What was it?" Maddie asks, stretching to look.
"Trash. Old things. Nothing useful." She turns back and looks at the girl. "What are you doing here?"
"The same as you." Maddie raises her eyebrows, and suddenly Clarke wants to kick the table, but she smiles.
"Since we're both on the same page, we know there's nothing here and we can go back."
"This doesn't look like nothing." Maddie walks to the map on the wall.
Clarke hates to admit it, but Maddie is right. So she waits as the girl figures it out.
Maddie takes her own map, it's the old version since they still didn't have time to copy the new one Clarke made, but it's almost as good. It's one of their rules: they have the same map, detailed with everything they discovered together over the years. Where you find the deer, bird nests, water, the best places to spend the night and, more importantly, where they can meet if they ever get separated. Maddie opens her map over the table and compares it with the one on the wall.
Clarke knows what the girl is trying to find. She feels the weight of her own map inside her jacket pocket and already reached the same conclusion Maddie is trying to reach. She sees it happening before her eyes and in a way, there's nothing she can do. She taught Maddie herself and she knows that denying the truth won't work. It never worked, at least is what she thinks most of the time.
Even if time is a strange thing.
Years ago, a girl lived in a cell because she wanted to tell everybody the truth the government tried to hide: They were all going to die. Probably. If they didn't do anything. She was going to be the first since she ended up sentenced to death.
But they did do something.
She survived.
Everybody died.
She doesn't know if the truth matters anymore.
So she doesn't know if Maddie knowing the truth about the map is a good thing, but she doesn't know if it's a bad thing either. She just leans on the counter and watches as the girl bites her own lips and figures it out by herself.
"The map is bigger," the girl says, looking at Clarke for confirmation.
Clarke nods.
Maddie opens a drawer, one that Clarke didn't notice beneath the table, and finds some yellowish paper there, but no pencils. Clarke takes the one she always carries in her pocket and hands it to the girl.
Maddie puts the new papers around her map and starts to make a rough copy of the one on the wall to complete it. But it isn't exactly what she's doing. She's just following one path until she reaches a point marked with an infinity symbol.
One that Clarke didn't notice on the bigger map.
"Maddie-" Clarke reaches for the girl, but she doesn't know what to do.
"It's beyond the desert," Maddie notices, too concentrated on it to see Clarke standing there.
"Hmm... Yes." Clarke stops by her side and looks at the two maps. "And you know what isn't on that map?" She points to the space between the infinity symbol and the old grounder territory on the wall. "The desert. This means this map is from before the first big explosions, a hundred years ago."
"But it has my symbol." Maddie shows her tattoo again.
"I know, Maddie. But the meaning of symbols changes all the time. It doesn't mean anything."
"We should go there and see, then."
Clarke shakes her head.
"Actually, I was wrong." Clarke goes to the map on the wall and points to the symbol. "It does have a meaning. Every time it appears, the world is destroyed again. We may be the only two people alive because of it, and I plan to keep it that way."
"So we have to walk in circles here until we die?" Maddie says.
Clarke opens her mouth to answer, but Maddie is faster. She points to the map on the table.
"We came here last year, and the year before and the year before. I'm tired of this, and you don't hear me."
"Excuse me, why are we here, hm? Because you said, let's go a little more, Clarke, just let's cross this forest. And I heard you."
"Yes! And now we found this place. It's a sign, Clarke."
"Oh my god." Clarke covers her face with her hands. She hears Maddie footsteps and raises her head to find the girl trying to reach the top of the map to pull it off the wall.
"I'm going," Maddie announces.
"Kiddo, I know it's exciting to find something new, I get that, but this is from before the radiation, you can't just simply follow anything that has the symbol."
Maddie turns to her, looking Clarke straight in the eyes with her chin raised.
"Yes, I can."
Clarke stares the girl down.
"No, you can't. You clearly aren't trained enough-"
"I don't want to train. I want to live!"
"You don't even know what you're talking about! You don't know what is not being allowed to live. To have to sacrifice yourself over and over again. This-" Clarke points to the map- "This is not living, this is dying."
"Let's see, then."
Maddie stretches again, and this time she can pull the map off the wall. Clarke crosses her arms and watches.
"I'm not going anywhere."
"Fine, I knew you didn't want anyway. You care more about her," Maddie says while she folds the map.
"What?"
"The woman in the drawing, you're waiting for her, aren't you? You try to speak with her on the radio."
"This- This is not what I'm doing, at all."
"But you still don't want to leave."
"Because-"
Because if her mother were alive, if her friends had survived in space again, if anyone were ever to return, they'd find her here.
Clarke presses her lips shut and turns to go back to the car.
"Because she left you like everybody else," Maddie says behind her, triumphantly and oblivious in a way that only a kid can be.
Clarke strikes fast. One moment she's near the exit tunnel, the other she's above Maddie grabbing her by the collar and pushing the girl against the table.
"Never speak about her again," Clarke says. Maddie stares into her eyes.
"She won't come back," Maddie says, firmly.
I will kill you, is what Clarke thinks, but swallows it. Instead, she stares back at the dark green eyes in front of her.
"You said you want to hear a story, right?" Clarke speaks, her voice is icy. Maddie's eyes fall to Clarke's hand pushing on her chest, but Clarke doesn't move away. "I'll tell you a story, kiddo. Once upon a time," she says, punctuating each word, "there was a Princess and a Commander. The Princess thought she knew everything about everything, she could see who was wrong and who was right, and she was sure the Commander was wrong. So one day, the Princess and the Commander meet and they- The Princess convinces the Commander to change, and she actually listens to the Princess and does as she says... " Clarke releases Maddie and moves away. "And now the Commander is dead. So yes, she'll never come back."
Clarke leaves and shuts the hatch on her way out.
---
The next day Maddie isn't in a good mood, neither is Clarke.
Clarke regretted leaving the girl alone in the shelter as soon as she got back to the empty car. But she didn't do anything. She couldn't. She needed to think, but thinking was the last thing she was able to do. Her mind was screaming. She needed time.
She mostly just slept on the hood of the car until the morning woke her up with a light rain and an empty mind. "I'm sorry," Clarke wrote in the note she left beside Maddie sleeping when she went to open the hatch.
The thing about a new day in a dead forest is that it reminds you that nothing really matters. So Clarke just gives Maddie space and keeps the usual routine.
Clarke sits on a rock next to the car and goes through each frequency of the radio and hears static noise. She does it every day. Sometimes she even talks to the silence: Hey, is anyone out there? It's safe to come back. Or, on the days she's feeling more adventurous, she talks about their day. Today, though, she just mechanically goes through it while she's waiting for the water to boil in the pot.
"Good morning," Clarke says, looking up when Maddie finally arrives,
a sullen look on her eyes and holding the beanie in her hand tightly. The girl has been in the shelter all morning.
Maddie looks back, her eyes sending daggers.
"How can you talk to me after leaving me there?"
"I'm sorry," Clarke says it again.
"You should be."
"So I guess you didn't change your mind."
"No, we need to get there."
"We can't leave," Clarke says. "It's dangerous."
"Haven't we been training every day for dangerous?"
"True, but what do you expect to find, Maddie? Be honest with yourself and think about it. You know I wouldn't simply disagree with it. You want to cross the desert, which is already a risk. And after that, what? The places on that map don't exist anymore."
"Really?" Maddie shows the old cloth. "It's black blood, like ours, you said that it was created to survive the radiation after those explosions. This is what mom was talking, that I had a greater importance to our people and I need to do it."
"Okay, stop right there. It was true, you are a nightblood and nightbloods were sent to Polis, but Polis doesn't exist anymore, Maddie."
"I don't care. You're not my mom. My real mother told me to find the symbol, I found it. Now I'm going there."
Clarke closes her eyes as her fingers grip the radio tighter. She wanted to make Maddie listen to her, just listen. If the girl could see it as clear as she can, Maddie would understand that they have food, they have a place to sleep and they know the animals around. They are safe. This would be trouble for nothing. But the young girl clenches her jaw and stares back with her green eyes, daring Clarke to disagree with her.
"Okay," Clarke says. She takes a deep breath and puts the radio on the ground.
"Okay?" Maddie repeats.
"Yeah. You didn't change your mind, but I changed mine. If you want to go, you should go."
Maddie opens her mouth, surprised by it, but she crosses her arms.
"Aren't you coming?"
Clarke shakes her head, “No.”
“Please, come.” Maddie offers her hand, but Clarke ignores it.
"Someone needs to stay here and keep an eye..." Clarke's eyes fall on the radio. "Just in case."
The silence that comes next is filled with tension, it’s as hard as Maddie's eyes when Clarke looks up.
"Look-" Clarke gets up and goes to Maddie- "I understand you. I wish I could make you understand me, but I guess, maybe, this is life. We need something to keep us moving, and this is yours." She takes Maddie's arm and looks at her tattoo.
Through the years, Clarke learned to ignore the symbol. The damn eight interrupt with four dots. Maybe a part of her always knew it wouldn't end well.
"Clarke," Maddie says, the voice catches in her throat and her eyes are bright with tears. "Come with me," the girl asks.
"You'll be alright. Remember what we trained." Clarke kisses her forehead. "You can always stay, though." Clarke blinks and Maddie yanks her arm away.
"No," Maddie says. "I'll prove you're wrong." She walks away.
Clarke sits with the radio and watches Maddie makes her bag. She takes more time than necessary, and they don't exchange a word. Clarke watches with the corner of her eyes Maddie taking forever to tie her shoelaces.
"The soup is almost ready," Clarke says, getting up to check the pot.
"I have to go."
"I always wanted more eggs, anyway."
Maddie finishes the tie pulling it hard e gets up.
"I'm going."
"Okay," Clarke answers, adding the eggs to the water.
"You're not going to say anything?"
"Hmm..." Clarke looks up, one strand of hair falls on her face and she pushes it away. "May we meet again?" She smiles.
Maddie puts the beanie on her head, turns away and takes a few steps before stopping again and turning back.
"And you know what? That story sucks. The Princess is a coward and she needs to move on."
This time, Maddie leaves.
She really leaves.
Clarke hears her footsteps moving away into the woods until there's nothing, but silence.