Survival's a Bitch

Chapter 2: Death behind both doors

You really should have planned ahead. Had you mentioned that? It was all you could think as you hurtled through Earth's atmosphere. I mean, REALLY. If you had just played your cards right, you might have been able to sign yourself up for the culling. You weren't usually one for self-sacrifice or martyrdom, but at the moment it seemed preferable to this experience. You were pretty sure you had emptied ALL of your stomach's contents onto the boy across from you. You really hoped he wasn't in here for murder. Maybe he was just a nice Jean Valjean, stealing bread to feed himself?

Ha! You were NOT that lucky. His hand wiped your vomit from his face to reveal one John Murphy. Close phonetically to Jean Valjean, but unless he bumped his head real hard in the next couple minutes, and got either amnesia or a new personality, you were pretty sure it was not close enough.

You knew in that moment, you were fucked. Probably more fucked than you had ever been. And, just to reiterate, you had landed yourself on a ship with a little over 100 people, over half of which would be dead by the end of the first battle with the Grounders. You didn't know how yet, but you were dead-set on being far the fuck away from that mountain when the time came. You were not a fan of needles, and less a fan of seeing your own blood in them. The bracelets were bad enough. Drills were out of the picture.

The first thing you did when the dropship crash landed was get the hell out of it. You unclipped your seatbelt and booked it to the first floor before anyone had even processed landing. You weren't about to look behind you and confirm, but you were pretty sure Murphy was a close second. You hated to ruin Octavia's iconic moment but you did prize your life and you were also pretty sure Bellamy hadn't grown into his protective leader role, yet. You pulled the lever without much thought. You could tell by Clarke's very evident screams that she was not happy, but as far as you were concerned, you were hardly even. A month's worth of 24/7 scraping to one pulled lever on what you knew for certain was asafe planet were definitely not equivalent offenses.

You were out of the dropship, racing through the woods before the door hit the ground. You didn't really know how much this was going to affect the storyline, but you figured it couldn't be bad enough to forfeit your life.

"Sorry for my weak stomach, Murphy!" That was the best apology he was going to get. You were not about to wait around to confront a known murderer. You ran straight in the blind hope that he got tired and realized chasing you was absolutely not worth it. You kept running long after the footsteps stopped. And only when you reached the end of a cliff did you really stop and take a look at your surroundings. You weren't about to get all fussy about being on Earth like the rest of the 100, but the experience was definitely a bit surreal. The Earth you remembered was roads and strip malls and traffic for days, but this was just tall pines, and clear creeks and silence. Sweet silence. You hadn't understood the 100's obsession with the machine hum when watching the show, but after experiencing it yourself for almost 18 years, you understood.

Silence was appealing. Unfortunately, after the adrenaline and newly-found appreciation for nature had passed, you realized you might be a little bit fucked. Murphy may have killed you on the dropship, but you were pretty sure you were about to get yourself killed in the middle of god-knows-where alone. Your journal was not very helpful location-wise. It was mostly words and sentence fragments, all in Greek, and started with less detailed bullet pointed notes, now surrounded by memories added into the margins. The journal you were holding was everything you could muster on the show in the last 18 years. But nothing in the show, other than a brief glance at Lincoln's map, would have set you up with geographical knowledge. Your best guess was that you had found your way to the cliff that Charlotte threw herself off of.

There was good and bad news if that was true. The good news was that you would probably be found in the near future; the bad news was that if you were found, it would definitely be by Murphy. More good news, though: if you survived that encounter, he wouldn't be following you back to camp.

Acid fog. That was another consideration. You were 90% sure there would be at least one bout of it before the Charlotte incident and you didn't exactly want to test whether or not the location was far enough away from Mount Weather to be safe. You had ran in a mostly straight line, right? You could probably just walk straight back to the dropship? Maybe camp-out nearby and sneak in for food when Murphy wasn't around. You were very effective at late-night escapades, aside from that one incident that ended you up in lock-up...— but other than that!

You had paid attention in Earth skills. It wasn't that you weren't confident in your knowledge. You knew the skills, and more from late night reading in the library. You were also fairly confident in your capability of utilizing them. What you did not think you were capable of was defending yourself against a hoard of Grounders, god-forbid, Reapers, or even the Mountain Men themselves. There was something about safety in numbers. In hindsight, you probably should have kept up a workout routine, but as already established, you didn't exactly have great foresight. And no, that irony was NOT lost on you.

You couldn't decide whether or not you were lucky that you didn't have to make a decision. Instead you were ambushed by what was, definitely a Grounder, probably Trikru, if you had to guess. You weren't given a chance to offer your very limited vocabulary in Tringedaslang, before you were shot with an arrow to the arm.

The arrow really shouldn't have taken you out. It was only a shoulder shot. They were obviously not shooting to kill. However, you were on your knees, ground swirling in unnatural ways that you could only attribute to accidental marijuana use. You had definitely been drugged and this shit was strong.

Your last thought before you were out was of jobi berries.