Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
MARLEY RECOVERED quicker than she thought she would. Considering how ill she'd felt, how unsteady and weak her legs felt, or how angry and painful her throat felt, the return to normal arrived almost as quickly as the sickness. According to Clarke, she hadn't had it as bad as some - probably because she hadn't had contact with Murphy - and, apparently, her prolonged dream-filled sleep had helped ease the symptoms.
Of course, her sense of time had been thrown out for a day or two and she wasn't exactly sure just how long it had taken for the strength to return to her body but she was fairly sure the sunlight seeping into the dropship was the sunlight of the following afternoon.
The quarantine was starting to lift, too. At a certain point, the sick were no longer contagious and Clarke had begun letting those restless patients leave and rejoin the others.
You don't realise how bright the sun is until you've spent two days away from it; Marley squinted in the light (even despite the fact it was dimming in the dullness of late afternoon), hand coming up to shield her eyes. But she'd missed it. As much as she loved the night — the bright flecks of silver across a sky of inky black — Marley had missed the sun on her skin, warm and comforting, jutting out in beams through the trees.
Oddly enough, she'd missed the sound and how it always descended upon you in rushing waves. It always reminded her that she wasn't alone — and not stuck in solitary confinement as she had been not too long ago — and, sure, sometimes the shouting was a little too much to bear when you were trying to sleep, for now, she was grateful for it.
Everything had been muffled inside the dropship from sound to smell to sunlight; it was like she was back in solitary confinement, even though she was surrounded by people, and for a moment in her delirious half-dreaming state, for one harsh minute she'd resigned herself to the belief that she was still stuck inside a lonely cell in lockup, an oddly calm panic shooting through her veins like jets of ice water until her voice brought her back to reality.
As she wandered towards her tent, feet finally back on earth and not metal, she noticed Elijah waving furiously at her from over the sea of material. His dark hair was falling into his eyes — as always — and he was grinning widely like a child who'd just been offered a bar of chocolate.
"Are you still contagious?" He questioned with a smirk. "I don't want your germs."
"I think I'm good."
Elijah grinned widely. He reached to pull Marley into a hug, wrapping his arms around her tightly, trapping her arms down at her sides. She was glad he was back to his usual self - all bright, toothy smile and an every-so-slight disregard for personal space that she'd grown used to - rather than the person she'd seen before she fell ill, with the dark, bruise-like bags underneath his eyes and the nervous flinching at every noise.
