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She memorizes everything she ever reads; she keeps Macchiavelli close to her heart, not as a manual, but as a warning to herself about those who profess to follow her. She’s drawn most closely to stories of Octavian - he who reunites the warring tribes of Rome at great cost to his own family and friends. But then there’s Julia, his only daughter. Julia demands to be educated as a man, and her father encourages this. But when she attempts to love as a man, he ruins her. She dies of malnutrition, a person without a people, banished in a foreign land. Sometimes, Lexa wonders if that will be her fate - a lonely death amongst strangers. Like Anya.
She puts that thought away and thinks of Catherine the Great, who leads her people to greatness and still finds time to debate great art and philosophy with the very people who produce it. Lexa doesn’t feel able to interpret her own reality, but she longs to find those who can, those who can look at the world and find its patterns, its dimensions, its beauty.
But until she finds her artists, she’ll settle for stories of the old days. Commander-ing doesn’t leave much time for novels, but she reads what she can, often wondering why most of the novels that survived the nuclear incident are about trivial men who spend so much time looking inward they miss the splendor of the world (she’s read The Old Man and the Sea three times, and still can’t figure out why anyone bothered to save it. Attacking peaceful creatures is a waste of energy).
Her favorites are the ones where young innocents are fated to become heroes; there’s one called Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Three: A Novelization that she stole from the library and never returned. She’s not sure what “A Novelization” is (it’s a novel, so surely that’s redundant?), but she knows she likes the story. Especially the bits about Faith. And Cordelia. Buffy’s a little whiny, and Willow’s a drip, but she still wants nothing but the best for them.
She scours these works to find any clue about how their world turned into this one; but no one knows for sure. The bomb that nearly destroyed the Earth was a punctuation mark with no sentence before or after; everything simply reset.
Sometimes, around the campfire, her warriors tell tales passed on from their grandparents, horror stories of crowded cities with no beds for the indigent, where the air could turn freshly-painted buildings grey in mere days.
They speak of the lottery, when the brightest young minds were invited to compete in brutal contests of physical and mental strength, for the privilege of escaping the Earth in spaceships meant to last centuries. The contests were limited to those lucky few who lived in gated conclaves, whose parents could somehow afford electrical light for late night reading, who didn’t have to scrounge around for their daily bread. None of her warriors had ancestors in the competition, but they are all certain they would have won if allowed to participate.
They tell her of the days after the incident, when healthy, breathing bodies would fall down and stay down. But some would rise again. No one knew why some survived and some didn’t, but those who did would burn the dead and move on. And then rebuild. And then keep going.
Lexa doesn’t have a family of her own to tell her stories, but she stores these other tales as if they were her own heritage. After all, they belong to her people, and she is one of them. She’d do anything to ensure their survival, and feels she has succeeded in that, at least. What comes after survival, she doesn’t know. But she longs to find out.