Cold

Chapter Two

Sometimes, Ashlyn wished that she had not stayed in Arkadia after the events of Mount Weather, that she had left like Clarke did, after making sure her people were safe. Besides the constant fear and trepidation that surrounded her when she was at the dropship with the rest of the hundred, she had felt a sense of freedom and value, that they for the most part had each other's backs and weren't restricted to a specific area or job.

This had quickly disappeared once the remaining people on the ark had come down and established a very similar order to the way things were conducted up in space. She was no longer free, confined to the metal bars that encircled the camp, separating the ground from the remnants of the space station, and what made the situation worse was that the supposed adults refused to acknowledge the hundred as anything more than children, when in reality they had far more experience and awareness of the ground than all of Skaikru combined. Nevertheless, Arkadia leadership rarely permitted the hundred to advise or act upon their knowledge, yet they were happy to stand back when Ashlyn and the others had endangered their lives aiming to save the rest of the people from the mountain.

It infuriated her to no end, she had finally tasted freedom and some happiness with her friends, they had found a sense of kinship, people who had experienced the same difficulties and pain inflicted upon them by the ark, often with no real cause, and now they were all expected to return to their previous lives, again seen as teenage criminals who only wanted to rebel against the leaders for no real reason, rather than the injustice, arbitrariness and corruption that had profoundly ingrained itself into the adults' mentality.

Another drawback of living in Arkadia was the familiar threat that someone would discover that her blood was different, that it was darker. When Ashlyn was young, her mother had constantly reminded her of the importance for being careful, so as to not risk a situation where she would be bleeding in front of others, it had been so deeply embedded in her mind that she would end up hiding from everyone, it was the safest way of not being caught out. Her mother had warned her that she would be tested for a defect or perhaps that it was a consequence of low oxygen levels, but ultimately she had stated that it was human nature to be fearful and distrustful of the unknown, and she would be in danger because of it, and that was what her blood was, unknown.

This had been the case for the first seventeen years of Ashlyn's life, she was abnormal, someone different, a person to be feared, until she had come to the ground. When she had seen Lexa, the commander of the grounders, and had noticed her blood being the same colour as her own, naturally her interest was piqued, she had spent hours trailing the commander and asking her questions to confirm whether she may not be alone in the colour of her blood. It turned out that the very thing Ashlyn had hated about herself for all of her childhood, was something to be valued and treasured among the grounders, it was refreshing.

Still, Ashlyn had only revealed that she was a natblida to very few people, Lexa being the first, followed by Octavia, Lincoln and a few others who had seen her injured and she could no longer hide it from them. When they had returned to the other members of Skaikru however, she had made them all swear they wouldn't reveal anything about it, as though she doubted she would be prosecuted or endangered from it anymore, she was still hesitant about revealing such a large secret about herself to everyone.

Fortunately, she could take a well-deserved reprieve of the fear and anxiety that was associated with the confines of Arkadia, if only for a few hours, as she and some of her friends had been scheduled to undertake a hunting and resource retrieval mission. They had been permitted to take the rover to scour the nearby surrounds for food and anything else that might prove useful to their peoples' survival against the oncoming winter.

Winter. It had been an ever-growing concern for everyone, of all the life-threatening experiences that they had gone through with the grounders, the mountain men and basic day-to-day survival, none of the people from Skaikru had gone through this particular season and were definitely underprepared, they had only just had brief dealings with summer and autumn, the latter had already seen to dwindling supplies of food and other essential items. Ashlyn remembered during her Earth Skills classes on the ark that they had learnt about the extreme cold temperatures, snow and frozen rivers associated with the season, that also produced famines, hypothermia and increased levels of sickness. It frightened her, though she couldn't deny that she felt a small sense of excitement at the possibility of seeing snow for the first time, she had only seen pictures of it as a child, however it never failed to fascinate her.