Clarke walks north.
She has two knives, a pistol with five rounds left in its magazine, and some dried meat in a pouch at her belt. The clothes she wears are of Grounder make -- a gift from the Commander when it became obvious that her old clothing was literally falling apart, Lexa raising her eyebrows with It is nothing, Klark, just take them when she tried to protest, and fuck, she really doesn't want to think about Lexa now -- leather and heavy cloth, better suited to the weather's growing chill than the clothes she wore before.
This is not enough to survive a winter. And she knows winter is coming. She's seen pictures of winter. Snow. Ice falling from the sky. It won't be as cold as space, but she knows you don't have to reach the absolute chill of vacuum to freeze to death.
If she doesn't starve first. She can hunt, and she knows something about edible plants, but she's mostly relied on the others to bring down game. And in the war camp, Lexa provided them -- but she really doesn't want to think about Lexa right now. She really doesn't.
Really.
What she's doing is self-destructive. Maybe suicidal. But it feels clean. It's just her. Whether she lives or she dies, it's just her. No one needs her anymore.
If Mount Weather couldn't kill her, maybe winter will. She deserves to die. She's killed so many.
If it doesn't kill her, maybe she'll learn how to live again. Maybe she'll learn how to live with this.
She walks north.
Her first kill is a squirrel.
It's a fat furry beast, and her knife finds its mark more by luck than skill. When she guts and skins it, the scent of blood taints the pine-and-soil smells of the forest, and blood runs warm and sticky across her hands.
She has to stop three times. She keeps seeing other times when her hands were covered in blood, other bodies, other faces, the walls of Mount Weather superimposed on the trees around her --
Post-traumatic stress disorder, she diagnoses, and focuses grimly on what is actually there, and not on the visual hallucinations.
She knows in theory how to tan the hide, but -- her hands shook, skinning. The fur came off in pieces.
She cooks the squirrel over a fire started with friction and stubbornness. The meat tastes like ash.
Afterwards, she keeps walking
If she's walking, if she's moving, she doesn't have to think. She makes snares and sets them when she stops walking for the night. In the morning, she checks them. Sometimes she has a catch to clean and skin. Sometimes she doesn't.
She doesn't sleep well. Her dreams are haunted. Sometimes her waking hours are haunted too. There's little in the forest to trigger her memories of Mount Weather, so the visual hallucinations come seldom -- but they don't have to come for her conscience to flay her open with all her ghosts.
She tries to count up the dead she's responsible for, once. She can't make it add up to less than eight hundred, and that only if she counts the minimum. In whole or in part, the ones she killed and the ones she didn't save, it's twice that.
Somehow, she's still alive.
She loses track of the days. The weather grows wetter, colder. She grows better at skinning her catch. She tans the hides -- learns that her theory doesn't work so well in practice. Learns better, through trial and error.
Hunger becomes a familiar companion, but she gets better at hunting, too.
She sleeps in trees, in caves, in places where she can put her back to something. Walks until she's exhausted. Sleeps badly.
She drops the gun in a river after she uses the last of the bullets to bring down a deer.
Getting rid of it doesn't change a thing.
It takes three weeks before she dares a village. The woods aren't uninhabited, not by a long shot, but she's avoided people up to now. Now, though...
...well, she might not think she deserves to live, but she's apparently too stubborn to lie down and die. She needs thread, needles, another knife. Twine or rope to set her snares. Salt.
She doesn't want to be recognised as Clarke of the Sky People, Clarke kom Skaikru. She's not actively suicidal. Passively, maybe -- she's sick and angry enough, hates herself enough, that some days she can't make herself care. But not actively.
Of course, she can't speak Trigedasleng, not properly. Between Lincoln and Lexa and everything else, she's picked up the basics of a functional vocabulary, but she won't pass for one of them.
So when she walks into a Trikru village, a ragged stranger with a string of (more-or-less) tanned skins bundled over her shoulder looking for a place to trade, she pretends to have a speech impediment.
It works.
The woman who trades her rope and needles for the deerskin offers her food and a place to sleep for the night. It might be out of charity. Clarke doesn't think she cares if it is. Her name is Anko and she has a large family: three half-grown sons and two daughters, and a brother and an aunt besides who live under her roof. Their noise and chatter make Clarke twitch with nerves and with strain. It reminds her of... before the Mountain.
It hurts like a broken bone, badly set. It hurts.
She deserves to hurt.
And she needs to learn the language. More words. Grammar. Structure. Listening will teach her more than running will.
Sat by a hearth, eating Anko's food and drinking thin brown beer, she hears Anko's brother say something about Maun-de, and she almost can't help her flinch. The Mountain. Skaikru killed the Mountain Men, he says. The Mountain is dead, and Heda has said there will be -- the word is truce, Clarke thinks, with a distance born of dissociation and shock, or maybe peace -- with the Skaikru, because Heda kom Skaikru killed the Maunon. All the Maunon.
Heda kom Skaikru must be Wanheda, to have destroyed the Mountain, he says, with something like reverence and something like fear. Commander of Death --
And after that Clarke can't stay.
She staggers up from the fireside with gasped excuses, out into the night before her stomach can spew bile onto her hosts. She has to go. She has to go.
She has to go until she can't see Maya's accusing eyes, the dead-staring burnt faces of children, the children she killed --
She'll never stop seeing them.