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This is a story told in three parts.
This is a story that starts in life and ends in death, like most do.
This is also, in part, a love story.
~~
It begins on the ground, with a child named Lincoln who learns how the world works at a very young age, and frequently doubts that it actually has to be that way.
This is what makes him special.
His people are told of the dangers of the world as children—never forget, he’s told, how tenuous your grasp on life truly is.
Death surrounds you, constantly. You use it as a weapon in order to survive, or it consumes you.
This Lincoln is told repeatedly, so that he never forgets.
He learns to fight—they train, they kill, they survive, he’s told, and he wonders if there can’t be another way.
The world is a dangerous place, he’s told.
He sees his first Reaper when he’s seven, because he’s off on an introductory scouting expedition with a group of others around his age, and they run into a lone Reaper. They see him ripping the flesh off of one of the clan hunters with his teeth. Lincoln recognizes the woman on the ground being ripped apart by a monster, and it hammers the lesson home.
This is a lesson in cruelty, he’s told, and he understands it immediately.
The world is a dangerous place.
He doesn’t see the Mountain Men until much later, but he hears stories. He loses brothers and sisters to them, his people. They’re never to be seen again, and Lincoln is chilled to the bone.
In this world, he learns, you kill, or you die.
~~
Octavia learns of cruelty at a young age—always stay quiet, always shrink down as small as you can, and never forget that you should not exist.
Bellamy never says that. He calls her a blessing, and his purpose, and sometimes it’s comforting, and sometimes it’s stifling.
Her mother never says that either, but Octavia always feels the weight of her life. They don't have to say it in so many words for her to know that it's true.
From what she knows of life on the Ark, everyone else knows how harsh life truly is.
Unlike them, she never forgets it.
Bellamy tells her about the people who get floated sometimes, about the crimes that make them expendable, that make them unworthy to continue to live, and she wonders, sometimes, how life can be so cruel.
It seems unfair, but there’s no other option for life in this world. Even though she, Octavia, had nothing to do with her own conception, if she were to be found out, she’d be imprisoned, she’s told, and at eighteen they’d kill her. Her mother would be killed too, just for having and hiding her.
She never forgets that either.
When she’s found out, they take her to the Skybox, where she actually meets people, and for the first time in her life she doesn’t feel so alone.
She’s allowed one last visit with her mother before they float her, and her mother says nothing, just kisses her forehead and smiles sadly, like she’s been waiting for this moment for a long time, which Octavia supposes she has.
They get a minute, and that’s all that happens, and her mother is taken away for her trial.
All trials end the same way, Octavia knows.
Bellamy comes the next day to tell her that it happened, and she knew that, of course, she’s not stupid.
This is the way the world works.
Later that night, she stares up at her ceiling and remembers that death is coming for her soon too, much like her own life—without any of her choices having anything to do with it.
Death, it seems, is inevitable.
~~
Finn Collins is an idealistic child. He’s a dreamer, a happy person.
He can’t explain it.
Life isn’t perfect by any means, and he scrapes against the walls of his prison—their prison, he thinks, their coffin in the sky, the extent of all that they will ever know.
He wonders if there’s more.
When he’s five, he meets the girl next door.
Well, he doesn’t meet her, but he sees her, and she seems nice and fun, and she looks like she could use a friend.
He watches one day when her mother brings home their rations and holds them over Raven’s head, and Raven looks up with a hopeful look for one moment before sighing and looking away.
This is Finn’s first brush with the way people really are. They’re selfish, he learns, when he wanders over to her while she’s waiting for her mother to finish talking with a neighbor.
“Hi,” he says with a smile.
“Hi,” she says, not even looking up from studying her hands.
“Would you like to play with me?”
“Why?” Raven looks up sharply.
“I don’t know,” Finn says. “You just seemed lonely.”
“I’m not lonely,” Raven snaps out. “You’re nosy.”
“Okay,” Finn says. “But if you change your mind, we could be friends, if you want.”
Raven stares at him. “Really?”
Finn doesn’t understand why she doesn’t believe him, but he nods anyway. “Really.”
Raven looks at her mother, who hasn’t even noticed their conversation, then she nods. “Okay,” and she follows him over to his home, where he shares his rations with her, and tells her about his big dreams, and the rest, as they say, is history.
This is the day that Raven starts to dream too, though Finn doesn’t know it.
This is the day that Finn discovers both cruelty and compassion.
~~
Lincoln is eleven the first time he kills a deer, and twelve the first time he kills another person.
The deer is easier, because it’s an animal, and it’s all about breathing and remembering the rules he’s been told.
The human is harder, because it’s a Reaper, and they fight dirty, and it’s not even supposed to be his fight.
His companion is killed by the monster, and while that happens, Lincoln searches around and tries to find his spear, and he starts to grasp for his knife but the Reaper is coming at him, so he gets it loose and jabs it into the Reaper’s throat, trying to not be completely terrified by the fact that it falls dead on top of him.
This is the first time that Lincoln kills a person, and he pisses himself out of pure terror. The others mock him for it later, even as they celebrate his coming of age, his success, they say.
They might make a warrior of him yet, they say.
He’s covered in blood, he’s a killer, and that’s all they can say.
This, he realizes, is survival.
Kill, or be killed.
~~
Octavia’s mother was the first person she’d ever known who had died, but an injured Jasper screeching and moaning for days, and then a dead Atom right there on the ground of front of her—this is the closest she’s really come to death at this point.
It’s worse than she thought it would be.
~~
Finn hears about people being floated all of the time, but he doesn’t really think about it all that much.
He’s high-spirited, and optimistic, and he’s always been so damn curious, Raven says with a scowl, and it’s going to get him killed one day.
He wants to see the universe.
He could look out a window, but it’s not really the same thing.
He makes a plan, and asks careful questions(Raven is a mechanic, and she has a lot of the answers, even though she gets increasingly suspicious of his motives).
He takes his spacewalk, and they throw him in the Skybox, and he wonders what comes next.
He makes friends, because he’s a friendly kind of guy, and it turns out this is a mistake, because one day one of them just up and disappears—“They floated him, didn’t you hear?” someone says, and this is his first brush with death.
More leave, more die, he corrects mentally, and he’s starting to prepare himself for his own death when everything changes in an instant.
“You’re going the ground,” he hears, and well, yes, this is the adventure he’s been prepping for his entire life.
These thoughts are broken up by the death of two other people who unbuckle from their seats because they see him do it, and he vows to do better.
Those deaths, he realizes, are on him.
This, for him, changes everything.
~~
Lincoln is fourteen, and his training continues, and then he’s fifteen, and he’s a scout in his own right, and he’s seventeen and requests a position far away from the others, all alone in a cave, while he watches his little patch of their territory.
Lincoln is a guard.
It’s almost two years of hunting, fighting a Reaper off every once in a while, and the occasional close call with the Mountain Men. He’s settling into his life.
He draws, sometimes. He trains often, he stops back home for regular reports, and he settles into a comfortable life. He is a solitary warrior, and that’s how he likes it.
He looks up at the sky, and he dreams of the world many years past, before the world had become what it is today. Most people have forgotten, he’s been told. No one knows what came before, and no one cares what will come next.
There’s only now, only living in the present and trying to survive for as long as possible.
He has this in mind the day the thing falls down from the sky, and he wonders if this is it, if this is the more he’s been craving, if maybe there’s a chance that life is not only just what he’s always been told it is.
He watches the strangers disembark from the spaceship—he’s heard stories of the people who had escaped the earth, and had chosen the sky, and he wonders what that must have been like. He wonders if they’re luckier than he and his brethren.
Later, he sees a brown-haired girl looking in wonder at the glowing insects from this part of the forest. There’s something about the way she acts like there’s something special about it that makes him wonder if there is.
He watches the camp, and waits to see what they do.
He waits, he watches, he learns.
He sees the girl again, sometimes, and she’s beautiful.
He draws her.
He’s curious about her, there’s something special about her.
He wonders what it would be like to look at the dangerous world around him and for a single moment see something beautiful.
~~
The strange man with the tattoos and the mask saves her life, and instead of being afraid like everyone else, she’s curious.
She wants to live, and if that’s what you want to do, then you can’t sit around being afraid of everything. You have to give people a chance, she thinks.
Apparently not though, because Bellamy doesn’t listen, and Finn ends up injured, and he almost dies, and did she not tell them that the grounder saved her life? Were they not listening?
Apparently not, because in one room Clarke and Raven are trying to save Finn’s life, and in another her own brother is trying to end one.
Octavia Blake has spent a long time fighting to exist, and she will not stand and be invisible, and stay safe in the corner.
She cuts herself with the poisoned blade, and looks up into the eyes of the man, and he nods to the cure, and she feels a surge of relief.
She looks back at him while Clarke goes to save Finn, and she wonders why he cares if she’s dead or alive.
She wonders if there’s hope here on the ground, if maybe they can make lives for themselves.
Maybe, she thinks, they could all have a chance.
Later, she cleans the man’s wounds, and he gives her his name, “Lincoln,” he says, and she pulls it in close to her heart, because this man is special.
Life and death mean something to him, she realizes, because he’d saved her life, when he could have easily killed her.
Lincoln, she tastes the name out on her lips, is special.
~~
Finn is not a fan of almost dying.
But he lives, and he vows to be better than just the guy who cheats on his girlfriend after ten days without her. He should have believed.
Finn vows to be better.
He vows a lot these days(and too often, he fails).
~~
Lincoln kisses Octavia, and she kisses him, and this, he thinks, is right.
She helps him escape, and then in the midst of the nut-related delusions, he comes face-to-face with the man he’d been tortured over, the one he’d stabbed with his knife and almost killed, and for a moment he sees panic and disorder and—and then Finn nods, and Lincoln leaves, and he thinks Octavia might not be the only reasonable person here.
Maybe, he thinks, there’s hope after all.
~~
Thank the gods for Finn, Octavia thinks.
They set up a meeting between their leaders, and maybe something good will come out of this after all.
She should know better than to be that optimistic though, because this is the life they all lead now.
Everything is so dangerous now(but Octavia’s life has always been dangerous, she’s always been on the cusp of something bad).
At least now, she thinks, she’s in control of her own destiny.
Lincoln slips into her heart, into small cracks and spaces she didn’t even realize were there, though she doesn’t say the words. She’s never been in love before, and it’s so soon, and it’s terrible timing, and their people are at war, so it’ll never work out.
But—but, maybe one day.
Maybe just now, at least, small moments in a cave where his hands are on her, and her fingers scrape at his back—maybe this is almost enough.
Skin to skin, mouth to mouth—these are the moments when she feels most alive.
~~
There is no hope, Finn thinks.
There is only death, and war.
This is their life now—short, and destined to end in bloodshed.
Raven ends things with him, and maybe she’s right to do it, maybe he doesn’t love her the way that she deserves, even though he wishes he could.
He turns to Clarke, who can’t love him anymore either, and he wonders what happens next.
War comes next, because it's the spiraling disaster they've been headed towards since this all began, and suddenly he’s saving Bellamy, because Clarke trusts him, because Clarke needs Bellamy(of all people) to lead.
Then there’s fire, and running, and screams consuming everything.
And now, all he knows is death.
~~
Lincoln carries Octavia as far as he can go, and he gets her where she needs to go.
He protects her with his every last breath, he thinks, because once his people find him, they will kill him.
But Octavia will live, and that’s what matters.
His people will punish him, and he’ll die, he knows.
Things turn out worse than that when he’s captured by the Mountain Men, but at least Octavia is okay.
At least, he thinks, there’s still hope.
~~
Octavia will find Lincoln.
She doesn’t know where to look, and she doesn’t know how to find him, but she will kill anyone who gets in her way.
Death, she’s learned, is a necessity.
You don’t kill everyone who gets in your way, not really, just the ones you can’t get around.
She keeps a mental tally of the people she’s killed, and she imagines marks on her body from them all, like Lincoln has. She wonders if they make him feel proud, or if they make him feel ashamed.
She thinks of her number, forever growing, and she wonders what she’s supposed to feel.
She finds her brother again, and he leads her and the others back to a safe haven.
She doesn’t feel safe, and she doesn’t want to stay.
She can’t be here, she thinks.
She doesn’t trust the people of the Ark. They don’t deserve to die, but she doesn’t choose to live her life with them.
When she sees Clarke, Octavia runs for her, hugging her tightly and laughing. She’s not even sure if she likes Clarke all that much sometimes, but sometimes it still feels like the right thing to do. She sinks into the hug for a moment and yes, she's grateful for this(and for Clarke). She watches awkwardly, then turns away when Clarke hugs Bellamy.
The 100( that number is forever shrinking now, she realizes) are her family now, for better or for worse. Her brain is already working out what happens next, where they have to go, and what they have to do.
Clarke is ready to leave too. It's time to get their people back from Mt. Weather, which apparently drains the bodies of grounders as part of some sick science experiment.
“I guess we have to go get them then,” Octavia says firmly, pulling out her sword, and the others nod in agreement.
~~
Finn hates killing.
But something—something breaks in him, and he doesn’t know how to fix it, and suddenly his entire life is this one thing, this one mission, this one truth about the world.
He murders an unarmed man in cold blood, and he does it simply because it’s more convenient to do so, because it’s safer than trying to tie him up and risking him getting out.
Finn wonders what this says about him now.
It wasn’t self-defense, it was murder, and on the Ark he’d be tried and floated.
It’s a time of war, he tells himself.
He remembers the history books, remembers the stories about people who told themselves the same things.
Remembers his own words days earlier, remembers saying that it was important to try to make peace without war, but peace has failed, and people are dead, and Clarke and the others are gone, and there is nothing meaningful left.
He cleans off his face at a river, and looks at his reflection, and he is so alien to himself he barely even recognizes the person in the water.
Murphy is quiet, surprisingly, not commenting much. Probably because he’s worried that Finn will turn on him next, Finn thinks, and he has a bizarre desire to laugh.
He’ll save the others, he tells himself. Everything will be better then, even if he completely ceases to exist, swallowed up by this new person he sees in front of himself.
Kill, he’s heard, or be killed.
Maybe there’s some truth to that after all.
~~
Lincoln doesn’t know what the Mountain Men are doing, but it’s worse than his wildest nightmares.
His people are kept in cages, and then they’re drained of blood, harvested, he's heard these people call it.
But not him, they say, not him, and some of the others, oh no. They’re different, they’re part of a different experiment.
For the first time in his life, Lincoln meets a fate worse than dying, and he begins to welcome death.
His thoughts are of the sky, of better lives than the one he’s lived, and of Octavia, whom he loves.
~~
Octavia and the others manage to catch up with Finn and Murphy, and Octavia is taken aback by the look on Finn’s face.
There’s something wrong there, she realizes, and she sees him greet Clarke, and then butt heads with her on every single decision considering the rescue of the others.
“Aren’t you supposed to be professing your undying love or something?” she asks him once they’ve settled into a campsite for the night.
“I was going to,” he admits. “But I’ve already done that, and I—I already did what I wanted to do.”
“You found Clarke,” Octavia says. “And you’re just searching for all the things that come next.”
“We have to save the others,” Finn says, and Octavia nods her head.
“Yeah,” she says. “We do.”
Finn is quiet, and so Octavia lets the silence beat on. There’s something comforting about it.
“Do you ever look at your reflection, and wonder how you got here?” Finn asks finally, looking down at his hands.
They’re clean, if a little scraped up, but Octavia has a feeling that he sees blood.
Bellamy had told her about the guy Finn had killed, and Octavia—Octavia remembers the Finn who never would have done that, even if she hadn’t known him all that well.
She remembers the funny Finn, the mildly flirty Finn she'd met that first day. The cute spacewalker she'd met, she thinks, is not sitting next to her.
“Yes,” Octavia answers. “I think about that naïve girl who danced with glow in the dark butterflies, and I wonder how I lost her so quickly.”
Finn nods his head. “I don’t want to be like this,” he says, his voice breaking, and she reaches out her arm and pulls him close, letting him cry on her chest.
He lets her, which is the bigger surprise, she thinks.
“None of us do,” she tells him. “Who we are, and who we need to be to survive are very different things.” She’s heard Bellamy say that before. She turns to look at Bellamy, who is trying to get some rest before it’s his turn on watch, and she wonders who he is now.
Her brother, she thinks, and that’s all she knows.
They’re all nearly unrecognizable.
Octavia strokes Finn’s hair. “We’re going to be okay,” she promises, and she closes her eyes for a moment, and sees the faces of the people she’s killed.
“Do you really believe that?” Finn asks her, and Octavia doesn’t know, so she lies.
“I do.”
~~
They find the other members of the 100, and they make a plan.
They sneak in, and they make some tough choices. They take advantage of the Mountain Men’s weaknesses, and they rescue their own people, and some grounders too.
They don’t touch the Reapers, because they don’t want to die, obviously, though there’s a little hesitation.
Clarke and Bellamy are leading the others out, and Octavia is just standing, staring at the only significant door they haven't yet opened.
Finn walks over to her.
“Do you think Lincoln could be here?” she asks softly.
“Maybe.” Finn raises his gun. “Let’s see.”
Octavia smiles at him slightly before hardening her face into a firm look of concentration. “Thank you.”
They go in, and thankfully there are no scientists or other Mt.Weather people there.
“Lincoln,” Octavia cries out, running over to his side, and freeing him from his restraints.
Finn watches the door, and Octavia helps Lincoln to his feet.
“You’re going to be okay,” Octavia says, and Lincoln smiles at her weakly, and Finn feels something clench in his chest.
Lincoln nods at him, and Finn nods back, and he thinks their understanding is still in place.
“Time to go,” Octavia says, and they shoot their way out, because their extra detour has given the enemy a little too much time to get back into the fight.
In the end, they escape, and the battle is over.
For now, anyway.
~~
Octavia takes him to her people, and Lincoln doesn’t feel comfortable with that, but it’s not his decision. Their healer looks him over, and proclaims that he’ll be okay with some time and rest, that no long-lasting damage seems to have been done.
“Thank you,” he says, and the woman nods at him before turning to go deal with another patient.
Octavia squeezes his hand, and Finn smiles. “That’s good news,” Octavia says.
“You’ve got a clean bill of health, now what do you want to do?” Finn asks, and Lincoln thinks he may be expecting simple like rest or eat, but instead—
“It’s time to go, Octavia,” Lincoln says softly. “These aren’t my people, and I can’t stay here.”
“They’re my people,” Octavia says, and they simply stare at each other, at a standstill.
“The Mountain Men will retaliate,” Lincoln reminds her, and Octavia sighs.
“That’s exactly why I can’t leave.”
Lincoln takes a long moment to just stare at her. “Then I’ll stay.”
“I can’t make you stay,” Octavia says softly, “If you don’t want to.”
“Your people,” Lincoln says softly. “Will simply have to become my people.” He exchanges a look with Finn then, who simply smiles awkwardly, because he really didn’t want to get stuck in this middle of this conversation.
“You already belong,” Finn says firmly. “Octavia accepts you, and so do I. The others—they’ll get there.”
Lincoln nods his thanks, and Octavia smiles, leaning over to kiss his cheek. “Thank you. I have to go check in on Bellamy, but—“
“You’ll be back,” Lincoln finishes. “Go.”
“Don’t worry,” Finn says, “I’ll keep him company," and he plants himself on top of a crate next to Lincoln’s bed.
“Thank you,” Octavia says, sending him a grateful look, and then she wanders off to find her brother.
Finn and Lincoln sit in silence for a moment, and Lincoln enjoys the moment. Quiet is nice, he thinks. And it's not the dangerous kind of silence he'd been surrounded with at Mt. Weather, no. This is a peaceful quiet.
He studies Finn, who is staring down at his hands.
“You can move on,” Lincoln says softly.
Finn looks up sharply. “I—“
“You’re struggling with the choices you’ve made,” Lincoln says, and Finn nods. “You carry it with you, every day. You can’t just wipe it away, because the stain will always be there, and you’ll always remember. But you can accept it, and use it.”
“Use it?” Finn frowns.
“To do better next time. Take fewer lives next time. Get better, so that you can disable your enemy without killing them. But sometimes you have to kill to protect yourself and the people you care about.”
“I can’t write it all off as collateral damage,” Finn says. “I don’t—I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
“Few do,” Lincoln tells him. “And it’s good that you can’t simply ignore it. It’s part of you now. Never forget.” He points down to the markings all over his body. “For some, these are a matter of pride, or a warning. But for others, they’re reminders of the people who have fallen so that you may survive, good or bad.”
Finn runs a hand through his hair, and then closes his eyes and breathes in deeply. “Does it ever go away?”
“No,” Lincoln tells him. “But it gets easier.”
Finn nods, like that's what he’d expected Lincoln to say.
“You can start over now,” Lincoln points out. “Your people have started over, so why can’t you?”
Finn looks taken aback by that. “I don’t know how to balance it all out.”
“Pick your lessons, and your reminders,” Lincoln tells him, “And carry those burdens forward.”
~~
“I love you,” Octavia says, staring into Lincoln’s eyes. “With all that I am,” she says in his language, proud of herself for hopefully not mangling the pronunciation.
“I love you,” Lincoln says, nodding his head. “With my whole heart.”
It would end there, it really would, with Octavia and Lincoln in love, but then there’s Finn, who, well, they have a fondness for.
“My people are very conventional,” Octavia admits. “Boy and girl get married, have sex, have one baby and no more if they don’t want to end up dying.”
“My people don’t care about love or sex so long as they don’t get in the way of survival,” Lincoln admits.
Lincoln and Octavia go back to studiously not watching Finn chop wood. He's bulking up a little, just enough so that Octavia can see muscles straining under his shirt, and she's not the only one looking.
“I like your peoples’ way better in that respect,” Octavia decides.
~~
Finn Collins is a murderer, but nowadays they’re all murderers.
They do what they must to survive, he tells himself.
He tries to connect with that person buried deep inside of him, to reconnect, really, to remember.
Life and love are gifts that should not be squandered.
He tries to tap into who he used to be, but it doesn’t work, so he follows Lincoln’s advice, and he starts over, and builds a new version of himself.
He adapts, he shifts and changes until he feels right again, and he can look at his reflection again without hating himself.
He turns over in his bed, knocking against Lincoln, who is stuck firmly between him and Octavia, and smiles.
There is, it seems, hope after all.