Ground Down

Chapter 7

Lexa sat on the edge of a bed lined with furs, hands clenched into the layers of warming skins, and tried to pace her breathing in sync with the carrousel spinning round and round and round inside her head. She had sat up too fast. Everything hurt. She had no idea what day it was. There was something wet and hot and sticky on her neck.  

The most tangible image inside her hazy memories was Octavia screaming. When she had entered the kitchen Saturday morning with her warpaint applied like her oldest sister had always done hers, her uniform darkened for the forest and her blades strapped to her back, her mother had stood, the room deathly silent, and then her coffee cup had shattered on the floor. Her father had come out of his office and stopped frozen in place, and then Octavia had started screaming and crying and lashing out against her, begging her to stop, shouting that she could not lose another sister and hearing her say that had curled fear sharp and bold in Lexa's stomach. She hadn't said goodbye. Her little sister had been thrashing against her mother's hold when Lexa had left the house. 

She had held it together entering the base, held it together until the three-shot salute had announced the beginning and then she had sprinted off into the forest, blindly aiming for distance between herself and the others, searching to cover as much ground as she could before she would have to fight the first head of unit and then she had bawled her eyes out. She had cried so hard her war paint had come down her cheeks in black trails and she had hardly seen who had tackled her to the ground through that. She had plunged her knife into their chest. 

From there, it was a blur. Flashes of Nia's white hair remained, haunted her every time she closed her eyelids, she could hear Ontari exclaiming when the silence became too thick and she remembered the wet gargling of that person with her knife in their lungs. The rest felt strangely distant. She could feel it in her muscles, the bones that had snapped and the wounds torn into her flesh, but she could not pry apart which had come from where, from whom, if she tried hard, she remembered falling off a high edge and hitting sandy ground undampened. A person on top of her. Traces of black smudged under her feet. She had lost a knife. 

Thinking about it, she thought she had snapped one of her swords. The gun had gone missing in the forest, she vaguely recalled a rifle, but the weapon clearest in her mind was General Franko's pistol. Her hand had come first. Lexa had been on the ground, she was relatively sure of that, but she could not say what kind of ground anymore, it had been so dark by then, and then the three-shot salute had rung in her bleeding ears and she had instinctively clutched her chest, searching the knife or bullet or arrow or spear that sealed her fate, and found General Franko standing above her. Pulling her up to her knees. A silver muzzle of a gun in her face, the black opening like an endless void, a hand in her hair and then the bang and pain exploding through her neck. 

Lexa reached up, fingertips feeling upwards from the shoulder because her body was heavy like filled with lead, she brushed a bandage, the flesh underneath tender and raw. Point blank range. She should be dead. 

"She's a child!" a voice said close by. 

She didn't feel like a child anymore. 

"She bleeds my blood." General Franko.

Lexa blinked her eyes open. She was alone. The room around her lay furnished in shabby grandeur, much less touched by the technological advancements developed through Skaikru's machine-focussed ways, the air was void of the sizzling and crackling of lines of electricity. She could make out the faint hum of a distant generator, smooth and steady. A pitcher and a plate were waiting on a small wooden table overloaded with candles. There was no artificial light. 

She got up, one hand on the frame of the bed, stopped to trace her fingers along the carvings. Double doors to her right, closed. Another set to her left, a frayed curtain drawn in front of them. Another room behind the head of the bed. Her legs nearly gave out under her, she more staggered than walked towards it. Rudimental bathroom. Clean though, perfectly beautiful save its lack of modern amenities. She reached for the bowl on the nearest cabinet to splash water into her face. It dripped grey back off her fingers, the mirror above it revealed so much swelling she hardly recognised herself, moss dry on her skin, brown smear below. Remnants of warpaint mixed with blood. Lexa tried to frown, but thought better of it.