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(Once there was a girl who looked at the Earth and thought: adventure.)
She discovered her favorite place on the Ark at age four.
In a quieter hallway, one that was occupied by the elderly, there was a window with a ledge big enough that she had been able to climb onto it, grubby hands pulling herself onto the tiny platform after one, two, three tries.
There were other windows this large in easier places to reach than this, but beyond the quiet - something she would later covet - her eye had snagged on something in the corner. She flattened herself to get closer to it, and smiled at the intricate flower someone had carved into the window frame. She thought she might want to do something like that one day, and she reminded herself to ask her mom for some pencils when she got back.
She curled up against the opposite corner and planned for the day she would reach Earth. She fell asleep against the glass and dreamed of swimming in rivers and digging her toes into the dirt. She woke to the sight of the flower, faded from age but still surviving in its little corner.
That night, tongue sticking out of her mouth as her eyebrows crinkled in concentration, she discovered a passion for art.
The spot became something of a secret for her despite its public location. She never met the original creator of the flower, but she practiced drawing ones like it until she was too big to curl up on the ledge and too mature to try anyway. She sat on the edge of the ledge instead and swung her feet aimlessly over the side, bouncing to an invisible beat.
By the time she was 16, her flowers surpassed their inspiration in leaps and bounds, and even her butt couldn’t fit on the ledge anymore, so she sat on the floor beneath it. Some days she felt as if the Earth wasn’t real, and the top of her head would peep over the metal and look out the window just to be sure.
Then her father took a permanent trip to outer space and Clarke’s new home was a jail cell and she didn’t draw flowers for a very long time. There were days that she thought she would finally crack, and days that she did.
Drawing came back to her six and half months into her incarceration, and it was an accidental return - she’d dropped her oatmeal, and it had burst across the floor in a star shape. She had the instant urge to draw it, something so ugly and distasteful creating such a sharp image.
Her art skills developed. She drew the ground, she drew the Earth, rivers and anything that wasn’t the Ark. She tried to draw her father once, but it ended in chalk smeared by tears and snot and her hands shook for days.
She did not try again.
Months later, the conflict of air supply hit its breaking point, and she found herself in a dropship with 100 other unlucky contestants in the Ark’s own version of Lord of the Flies. One idiot later and two contestants have died before the game could even begin, and the dropship had one more inhabitant than they’d thought. The world’s only pair of siblings, and the girl named Octavia was the first human on Earth in a hundred years - or so they thought.
Clarke’s feet touched the ground and her lips pulled up into a smile for the first time in a very long time.
(Once there was a girl who took her first step onto Earth and thought: beauty.)
Weeks down the road, feet weary and eyes crusty with weariness, Clarke is unable to grasp what had been so beautiful about the damned place. She has lived in these woods alone for a week and a half, and she’s surely lost several pounds thus far. Feeding herself requires hunting, and she is too exhausted to be quick and nimble. Living off berries and plants is taking its toll, and she can’t find a reason to care.
Bodies. Hundreds of bodies. Children, adults, the innocent and the guilty alike, dead and gone and all because of the lever she pulled. The pain is irrelevant because she deserves nothing but pain, and she remembers the look in Bellamy’s eyes when she kissed his cheek, and she wonders how quickly that pain and need will turn into a broken sense of betrayal and anger. Perhaps it already has. Octavia will think she is weak, and Raven will be glad her lover’s murderer is gone. Leaving left her with nothing to go back to, and she sees the bloody bodies, the children still clutching each other’s hands-
She does not sleep much.
When she does, her slumber is interrupted by nightmares and frequent screams into the night. It’s a wonder that some larger animal hasn’t found her and picked her off in the night yet, perhaps a mountain lion or a pauna-
She cuts that thought off quickly, shutting down the memories that threaten to rise. Life moves on.
There are moments when she nearly manages a smile, and there are moments when she pleads for death. Most of the time she is a fine mix in between, and a hollowness lingers whenever the trees light up at night. She stares at the glowing plants when she awakes, gasping for breath, but she finds that she cannot wish for the days of the dropship and night trips into the forest, because even though she had some remnants of innocence back then (innocence now blown to smithereens), at least those she cares about are not fighting for their lives and dying off every other day. They have a home now, a place to mend each other and form a nation that will last.
(Clarke wonders if she will ever get to see it. Then she doesn’t, because she knows the answer. It isn’t a happy realization.)
She reaches the ocean a few weeks in, and she sits on the sand for a few hours and wonders if she will always eventually hit a dead end in everything she does. She decides to head diagonally back into woods, keeping a decent distance from the shore just in case. She hasn’t eaten in many days now, and hasn’t seen a river in just as long. She is weak.
Edible plants are far and wide around this area, and she finds berry bushes that have already been emptied. It’s too little too late when she finds footprints and worn tracks, and when she turns to go back, she sees a face for a split second before something is shoved over her head and a large object is rammed against her bagged skull.
Two hits, and she’s gone.
It’s night time when she comes to, and her gaze focuses on the stars above first. There are people talking a few feet away in a confusing mixture of English and Trigedaslang.
“Dison laik heda kom Skaikru, idiot. What were you thinking?”
“Shof op-” The tent flapped, and more footsteps appeared. She shut her eyes quickly, slowing her breathing, and listened closely for anything discernible. Where was she? Which tribe? Were they hostile? Heda kom Skaikru, they had said. They knew her.
The new person spoke, and her blood ran cold. “Em ste laksen?” the newcomer snapped, and there was a shift of fabric and clicking of armour as she neared. She held herself absolutely still save for the soft rise and fall of her chest. “Chit yu don dula op?”
“I’m sorry, heda. We didn’t recognize her until after it was too late. She’s dehydrated, severely so, and she’s underfed. She was searching one of our berry bushes when we found her. The bruise is the only thing we did to her. We had to knock her out, heda, I’m sorry.”
“Gon we o wan op,” Lexa hissed, and Clarke understood this message at least - leave or die. “Jomp em op en yu jomp ai op. Gon we!”
The tent opening fluttered again, and the man left, leaving the two women and Clarke, itching to run but not daring to.
“She will be fine, heda. This was the plan, was it not? She will need to eat fuller meals to gain back her weight, and she needs to stay hydrated, but she is not scarred.” The stranger’s voice was warmer than Clarke expected it to be, more comfortable around Lexa than most people were.
There was a pause. “I fear her scars run much deeper than that,” she murmured. “She is quite a distance from the Skaikru. A week, at least. This may have been what I wanted, but I did not want it in this way.” Her voice was shielded, and the words were spoken blandly, but she knew there were deeper emotions behind each syllable. Clarke’s chest grew tight, and she wanted out. All these weeks trying to avoid thoughts of her, and now she was here, in the same damn tent-
Fingers brush her forehead, skimming around the bruise pulsing on her head, and this is finally too much to bear.
Clarke grabs the hand and twists, rolling off the table and flexing her grip on the wrist in her hand. Blue eyes meet green, and she shoved the knife from her pocket against the side of Lexa’s throat. She’s breathing hard, and her vision swims, but she keeps it there, balanced against her skin. “I should kill you,” Clarke says, built up rage bubbling over. “I should slit your throat.”
A dagger finds itself nestled underneath Clarke’s ribs, threatening to plunge into her skin, and the second woman speaks. “Try and you will die,” she hisses.
“Alaika,” Lexa says clearly, “Jomp em op en yu jomp ai op. Gon we.”
“Heda-”
“I said leave!” she snaps, and the bobbing of her throat scrapes her skin against the blade. “I will handle her. Tell no one, Alaika.” Clarke is frozen, not daring to move with the dagger pressed against her.
Then it is gone, and the woman steps through the opening. They are alone, and Clarke finds that she still can’t move. Her voice is clogged in her throat, but Lexa speaks before she can try to unclasp her lips. “Clarke,” she says, eyes assessing her and her grip on the knife. She clenches it tightener. “If you are going to kill me, do it now. I will not stop you. But you need treatment, and I can give that to you.”
“I want nothing from you,” she spits, finally finding her voice. “I don’t need help, and I sure as hell don’t need your help.” She drops the blade, and she tells herself that it’s because she would be murdered the second she stepped outside the tent if she let the Commander bleed out.
Lexa exhales when the knife is dropped, but she looks no less tense. “You are moments away from falling over, Clarke. Sit down.”
“Fuck you.” She manages to take a step back, but her legs collapse underneath her and Lexa catches her by her arms, tight enough that she didn’t falter when Clarke tried to shove her away. “I don’t need you.”
“Clarke,” she says, and her voice is so exasperated that it finally gets her to pause. She grudgingly meets her gaze, eyebrow raised as if her companion’s arms were not the only reason she was upright. “Give me one day. We don’t have to talk, you can spend the whole day in this tent and then we will send you on your way, but you need food, water, and a chance to let your head gather itself again.” A lingering silence, and she squeezes her forearms a little tighter. “Please.”
She sits down on the little mat, sprinkled with dry blood and filth, and the room reminds her of Tris. Her heart clenches. The first of many deaths I caused. She thinks of them again, of the charred remains outside the dropship and the 18 corpses in the village and the radiated bodies in Mount Weather. She can picture them staring her down, accusation and pain in their dead expressions. She had imagined herself as a corpse next them many times, and couldn’t decide if it was an image she wanted or not. Revisiting that thought now, she does not know if she wishes to die, and she supposes now would not be the moment to waste the chance of living long enough to figure that out.
Clarke looks at the girl before her and gives a firm nod, hands digging into the fabric underneath her. “24 hours,” she swears, and Lexa’s lips twitch until they form the smallest of smiles. “24 hours and then I’m gone.”
“Of course.” She turns to leave, then glances back. “The tent restriction is just an option, for the record. There are more comfortable living spaces. And you have some admirers here who would like to see you. I fear you’re more popular than I am these days.” She extends a hand, an offering that means far more than a tour and a soft bed, and she refuses to be tempted.
Clarke stares at it until Lexa lets it fall. She doesn’t raise her eyes back to the brunette, but she can feel the disappointment radiating from her.
“Please get some rest. Alaika will return shortly.” She lifts the tent flap. “Polis welcomes you, heda kom Skaikru.”
Then she is gone, and Clarke is left staring at where Lexa’s hand had been moments before.
(Once there was a girl who saw what the Earth had changed her into and thought: monster. She wondered if she had been one all along.)
(She thought that perhaps she knew the answer to that one too, and she wept.)