The first sign had to be the fighting. Which, of course, happened after Elyza showed up.
Her daughter was a peace-lover. She fought with her words and never her fists.
She was a vegan, for goodness’ sake.
But there she was, her precious daughter of only seventeen years, leaping off the hood of a car with what she could only describe as a war cry.
Straight into a horde of infected.
Madison and Nick could only watch with their jaws dropped to the floor as Alicia spun around again and again, swords - swords! - practically an extension of her arm. It looked…
It looked natural.
And that was what puzzled her.
Because it shouldn’t be natural. Alicia was never sporty - she was fit, sure, she went to gym class like every other kid and went on runs and whatever, but she wasn’t sporty. And she’d never taken a martial arts class in her life - let alone handled swords. She looked comfortable with the weapons held tightly in her weird bone-detailed gloves (honestly, where did she even get those?), not even worried that she had just leapt into a crowd of humans, or infected, or whatever, that were trying to eat her.
And when she had finished, she wiped her blades off on the clothes of one of the fallen bodies around her, and complained that she now had blood on her very expensive, very fake, vegan leather jacket.
The second time was when she caught her and Elyza speaking to each other.
But not with their mouths. With their eyes.
They’d just pit-stopped in some random town to gather some supplies for the rest of the journey when they came across the debate of whether to ransack houses or shops. Houses were less dangerous, and they were less likely to come across an impossible amount of infected, but shops would have more supplies. It wasn’t the first debate they’d had about this - but they’d decided on houses the last time they had stopped in a much smaller town and turned up almost empty handed. They couldn’t afford to do that, not again.
So their odd little bunch was huddled round a table, only a couple of candles right in the middle of them casting light, throwing ideas and suggestions around, when Madison noticed that her daughter was being unnaturally quiet. She would usually have something to say at this point - helpful information, something they’d missed earlier, but it appeared she was having a telepathic conversation with the blonde next to each other instead.
She watched as they held each other’s gazes for a confusing amount of time, brows occasionally furrowing and mouths forming silent words before Alicia turned towards the group again, setting her shoulders the way she had always done but this time adding a small tilt of her chin, and before she knew it her daughter was commanding the attention of the entire table.
“We need to target the smaller shops and pharmacies, then head to the nicer parts of the town. They’re awkwardly out of the way for anyone on an escape route, so they’ll be the most reliable.”
And with that, the group agreed and started planning.
Madison didn’t miss the secret smile her daughter shot at Elyza.
The next was the touching.
They were, simply, always connected.
She didn’t even know how, most of the time. She would always catch them - pinkies linked together here, thighs too close together there. They were sitting on the opposite ends of the back row of the car and they still found a way to tangle their ankles when Ofelia put her feet up on the centre console.
The thing is, sometimes it wasn’t intentional. Sometimes they would try taking naps on either ends of couches they’d find in random houses, but when Madison would walk back in to wake them for a meal, they would be so close together she wouldn’t even know where to begin to try and take them apart. She barely even knew which limb belonged to which girl.
What disgruntled Madison the most was the nervous disposition her daughter occupied whenever she wasn’t touching Elyza. She could see it in the way her eyes would dart around the room, in the way her legs would bounce up and down, in the way her hands fiddled with any and everything they could. Never still, never stopping, even if Elyza was within sight. She had to be touching her, linked with her for Alicia to be comfortable.
Which didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. They had barely known the Australian for two weeks, and although Strand clearly trusted her enough to let her on the boat (fair enough, really, seeing as she saved all their lives), nobody should be that close to a stranger after two weeks. Her daughter wasn’t the most trusting person, not after what had happened to their family. She had seen how she was with Matt - weeks before she even agreed to go out on a date, more before she let herself feel anything for him, yet here she was, a fortnight in and already dependant on the mysterious stranger.
The last hint Madison needed was even more confusing than the last few.
Her first reaction to hearing her daughter converse to the blonde in a completely different language was to think that they had created a secret code to talk in so the adults wouldn’t know what they were saying.
Her next thought was that her first was utterly fucking stupid, because that was something Alicia and Nick had done when they were seven or eight and it involved saying each word backwards, complete with ridiculously long pauses to think of the word in the first place. The two mature teenagers wouldn’t dream of stooping to such a childish level, and the more she listened outside the door, the more she realised that the language was so complex that it would’ve taken more than two weeks to make up.
Her second reaction was to barge in, only to stop in her tracks when she realised that yes, her daughter was lying directly on top of Elyza, shirt hitched up slightly where the blonde’s hands were tracing shapes lightly, with her chin propped in her hands as they talked.
She probably should have said something, but seeing your daughter literally straddling someone tends to wipe your mind somewhat clean.
“Mom! What the hell, knock first! Jesus!” Alicia was quick to snap, tender atmosphere shattered as she simultaneously rolled off Elyza and rolled her eyes, tugging her shirt down.
“Chill out, ‘Licia.” Elyza said. Or maybe she didn’t. It didn’t sound like ‘out’. Did Australians drop their t’s?
“She can’t just barge in here!”
“I’m your mother, I can do whatever I want.” Madison stated with the little authority she felt was actually valid in this situation. It wasn’t a lot. “What is this?” She gestured vaguely to the situation in front of her, wincing when she realised how ridiculous she looked.
“It’s a bedroom, mom.” Alicia sassed effortlessly, and Elyza snorted slightly before trying to cover it up with a cough. At least she had the decency to look mildly apologetic when Madison shot her what could have been a withering glare, but what probably looked like a preschool teacher getting fed up at some kid eating sand again.
“God, Alicia, don’t be like this. I mean with you and Elyza. What’s happening? You’ve known each other for all of two weeks and you’re already- you’re- you’re this?” She floundered for the end of her sentence desperately, taking into account the slightly panicky looks overtaking the faces of both girls.
“Stop being weird, everything’s fine.” Her daughter refused to meet her eyes, and she started fiddling with the stitching on the duvet. Ah. She was getting antsy about Elyza now. Madison glanced over to the other girl and her hands were twitching too, looking like she wanted to reach out to the younger girl but obviously not wanting to do it with her mother in the room.
“It’s not fine. You two,” She motioned between the girls. “Are something. You communicate in looks, you’re suddenly a fucking samurai warrior, you can’t stand being apart for more than two seconds, you talk in another language. What is this? What’s happening?” Madison ran a hand through her messy hair, worry beginning to show that she was making everything up. Was she making a big deal out of nothing? Was she imagining things?
“I-” Alicia started, but she stopped, exchanging a helpless look with Elyza. “Ai souda tel em op, Klark.”
The sea bass Daniel caught was poisoned. She was hallucinating. She was hallucinating, and none of this was real, because her daughter just said something in a language that was not English and she just called Elyza Clarke and it couldn’t be real because that would be fucking weird. Which is saying something. You know, given the zombie apocalypse.
“Sha, Leksa.”
And it got weirder.
“Okay, mom, I have to tell you something, and you have to not freak out. Okay?” Alicia stood up and placed her hands on her shoulders ever so gently, gently pushing her down onto the chair opposite the bed, before clambering on to face her and smiling faintly when Elyza sat next to her without her asking.
“Mom?”
“Yeah. Okay. I mean, I’m freaking out, but okay.”
“You’re not going to believe me when I tell you this. But you need to try, okay?” Alicia leant forwards slightly, puling Madison’s eyes up from where they were fixed on the carpet.
“Okay. Sure. I can do that.”
“Elyza and I know each other from a past life.” Alicia spoke.
“Not past. Just another life. It was actually in the future.” Elyza chips in, and Madison feels her head spin.
“Could you not have left it at past life?”
“Jeez, sorry.”
“Mom? Are you okay?”
“Uh.” A pause, as she looked between girls. They couldn’t be faking the anxious expressions they both held on their face, even though Madison wished her hardest for it to be a joke. One big joke, and they she could go back to worrying about normal things like whether it was morally right to shoot something that may or may not be a human in the head when it was trying to rip your throat out. “Yep, all good. Um, maybe a little explanation?”
“Um, it’s from around a hundred years in the future. A bunch of nuclear bombs went off and a bunch of people went to live in the space station because they thought the Earth was inhabitable. It wasn’t and there were people left on earth, but the people in the space station didn’t know that but they found out when their oxygen systems started failing and they sent a bunch of kids down to test whether the rest of them could live. Clarke - sorry, Elyza - was one of the kids sent down, and I-”
Alicia stopped, not really sure how to continue. She shot the blonde a look, who smiled gently before twisting it into a grin and facing Madison. “Alicia was this girl on the ground who was basically the commander of all the clans. There were twelve. Her name was Lexa, but her people-”
Madison thought she heard Alicia mutter something like ‘my fucking people’, for some reason, but she wasn’t sure. Elyza just smirked and continued.
“Her people called her Heda or Commander. They had their own language called Trigedasleng, and that’s what you heard us talking in.”
“I was, um, shot. By someone. And Elyza died killing the person who shot me.” She tried to keep her words neutral, but her mother heard the fondness that crept in, and it was made even worse by the disgustingly sweet look she then shot the blonde next to her.
“I see.” Madison nodded a couple of times, then a couple more. Maybe if she continued nodding, it would wake her up from this nightmare she was obviously having. She tried pinching herself a couple of times discretely, to no avail.
“You do?”
“Not in the slightest. But how do you guys… how do you know? Did you just… remember? What? I hope you realise that this literally makes no sense. You both had different lives, but they were in the future?” She squeezed her eyes shut, trying her hardest to make sense of everything. They had explained it well, but the idea? She just couldn’t wrap her head around it.
“I know that. We know that. But we’re not lying. Everything we’re saying is the truth.” Elyza spoke, serious for one of the first times in Madison’s company.
“We- um, we found out, uh, it was like a series of really quick flashbacks a couple of hours after we met. I thought she seemed really familiar, I just… I couldn’t really put my finger on it? And then something must have… something must have triggered it, I don’t know.”
“It was all really fast. It was like watching an entire movie in a couple of seconds. I was only eighteen, and Lex- Alicia was twenty-one.”
Madison sat for a while, comprehending. Or mustering the courage to try and start comprehending. Her daughter had another life. One that she was shot in. And it was some sort of post-apocalyptic earth. And she met Elyza - or Clarke, or whatever - in it, and now they were together in this life, too. And this made some things make sense. It made the fighting and the weird language make sense, which was nice, because it means she wasn’t going completely insane. Maybe partially insane, but hey, wasn’t everybody?
What this other life business didn’t explain, however, was the non-verbal communication and why she had just walked in on her daughter assuming the position.
“So you knew each other, in your other life?”
A pause.
Lots of blushing.
Awkward looks.
“Ah, I see.”
“See what? What do you see?” Her daughter spat out, eyes darting from Elyza to her mother and Madison had to bite back a laugh at how comical it was to see her usually composed daughter lose her cool like that. Elyza was just sitting there, seemingly unaffected by the statement, until she realised that her hands were tangled in the sheet anxiously.
“You two. Were together. In this past life thing. Future life. Whatever.” Her daughter’s eyes widened in horror. Honestly, Madison had given birth to her, did she honestly think that she wouldn’t pick up the painfully obvious signs they were showing?
“I- um, we weren’t- well, I- it wasn’t like- I mean to say-” She trailed off, looking to Elyza helplessly, who just shrugged. They then proceeded to do that eye communication thing that Madison could tell would quickly become insanely annoying, before Alicia turned back to her mother and tilted her chin up. “Yes, we were together. And I understand that it might come as a shock, and that you might not believe us, but I love Elyza and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ve said it before, if she goes, I go, and we’re more than capable of taking care of ourselves so-”
“Alicia.”
“- I’m telling you, mom, we’ve found each other in this life and I refuse to let this-”
“Alicia.”
“- opportunity to spend all the time we missed out on together go to waste just because-”
“Leksa. Yun nomon shish yu op.” Elyza said softly, and Madison hated how quickly she got her attention. She wondered how long it would take for her to learn the language?
“Sha?” Alicia turned her attention towards her mother, before shaking her head and shutting her eyes, drawing herself back into the present. “Sorry. What were you saying?”
“I don’t have a problem with you and Elyza being together. Nor do I have a problem with this other life, or the language. Are you going to tell the others?”
“Probably. At some point.” Alicia shrugged, moving her hand almost unnoticeably so that it would touch the blonde’s slightly.
“Okay. I just need time to process, that’s all.”
“Cool. Thanks, mom.”
“No problem.” A pause, somewhat awkward as they all sat there. “Alicia?”
“Yeah?”
“Keep the door open. At all times.”
“Tell me you’re not being serious.”
“It’s the zombie apocalypse, ‘Licia, let me play protective mama bear at least once in my life.”