Finding Home | #Wattys2016

Chapter Ten: It Never Ends

Chapter Ten: It Never Ends

That evening, Elyza realized how incredibly nervous she was. It took them nearly twenty minutes to find the mess hall even after asking someone for direction. When they arrived, it felt like high school all over again. It oddly reminded Elyza of being the new kid. She didn't know where she was allowed to sit, but the sting of loneliness was lessened by having Octavia standing next to her in line.

The food wasn't the most appetizing, but there was a limited supply so Elyza didn't really feel like she had the right to complain. It was delicious though, especially since she didn't know if she would be going without food any time soon. There was a chance something could go wrong and she'd be fighting for her life again.

Octavia drew her out of her thoughts as they took a seat at a secluded round table, "So what did you do after you left?" Clearly she was trying to be as non-judgmental as possible by making her voice sound light and conversational. But it was obvious that she wanted to know why Elyza had abandoned them so quickly.

Elyza didn't think it would be a good idea to tell her that she'd been drinking her sorrows away, so she went with a much less depressing story. "I was on my way to Santa Monica and holed up in a storage unit one night when I heard some noises and went to investigate. I got into some trouble with an infected and some of these guys saved me. Then I woke up here."

Octavia nodded, but didn't comment on her story—which Elyza was grateful for—and instead decided to shovel food into her mouth. Bellamy, Finn and Aurora followed soon after, sitting down across from the two girls. There wasn't much discussion as the five took in their surroundings—their new home.

Almost every sailor was in the mess hall, and there wasn't many. A maximum of sixty people surrounded them, all talking to each other while others ate in silence. There wasn't as much light and cheer as one would think, maybe because the weight of the current world situation was too serious to make jokes at.

Elyza could understand that, it took a while to wrap your mind around a situation you'd only watched in movies or read about in books. People getting sick, dying and then coming back capable of getting other people sick through biting. This is a TV show everyone loves, but nobody wants to be a character in, Elyza mused silently.

After a while, Elyza noticed that Harper had entered the mess hall with two guys following behind her. The two girls made brief eye contact before Harper stepped away to get food, which gave Elyza the chance to see who her two friends were.

One was a tall, lanky man—no, boy—with shaggy brown hair and heavy fatigues hanging off of his body. His eyes were large and kind of bulged out of his head, he had a not so attractive five o'clock shadow on hollow cheeks. He was angular and continued to hop on the balls of his feet, clearly jittery for some unknown reasons. Elyza thought he looked like the type of guy to be doing something illegal and being unable to get away with it.

The other boy—that was the only way she could describe the two—was much shorter with dark black hair the swooped into his eyes. His eyes were dark and he continued to look down at the ground, standing close to the taller boy. His shoulders were held back with a ridge confidence though, even if he was acting meek. Elyza had a feeling that the sweet, innocent look of his was more of a cover that people underestimated.

"What are you looking at, Aussie?" Finn leaned over and touched her arm. She jumped away and returned her attention to the people before her.