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After the battle, Clarke disappeared for two months, seventeen days and six hours. Or something close to that – you were unconscious for hours after you got back to camp, remember only fragments of that day.
(The taste of blood in your mouth, Wick holding you, light filtering through leaves and pain and pain and pain).
Later, Octavia tells you that Abby tried to treat the wounds on your face and arms, tried to keep the burn on your side from scarring, but there wasn’t any medicine or anything to work with. No infection set in, and you nod silently, because your looks don’t really matter here, not at all.
Octavia bows her head and you focus on her tightly woven braids.
“Did Lincoln do those?” You ask, and Octavia looks at you slightly surprised.
“Yeah,” she says, brushing her fingers over them, “He could do your hair too, if you wanted.”
No, you think, no, I belong to the sky, and you smile at Octavia.
“Sure,” you say, and she smiles back.
Everything is so fragile.
/
Lincoln comes later that day, looking slightly bashful and completely out of place in the tiny med bay.
“Octavia said you… wanted your hair braided?” He asks it like a question, and you’ve never really spoken with him, not ever but: he looks kind and this war took his heart too.
“If you think you can do it, grounder boy,” and he laughs (it’s loud in your silent world), startles the part of you that still flinches when people come too close.
He crosses over to the bed that you’ve been stuck in since the end, and carefully picks you up (Abby promised you would walk again; Abby promised that the Earth was safe), helps you sit on the half-falling apart couch that Bellamy slept on when they weren’t sure (if you were going to live).
“Do you want it like Octavia’s?” Lincoln asks, twisting your hair around his fingers.
“Whatever you want, Hulk,” and he looks kind of confused (you guess they don’t have comic books on Earth), and you figure the joke was kind of tasteless anyways.
“Nothing, Lincoln,” and he combs your hair back from your face (no one’s done this for you since you were twelve and starving; twelve and half-in love with a now dead boy).
Lincoln’s braids are neater than Finn’s ever were; you hate yourself for thinking about Finn, not now. Lincoln pretends not to notice when you start to cry, just keeps pulling your hair into tiny, intricate braids.
He finishes silently, a hand soft on your shoulder.
“If you ever want to go outside, please ask me,” he whispers, and nothing in you deserves this kindness.
You’re still kind of crying, so you just nod.
/
Octavia visits every day, and after five weeks, you let her hold you up as you take a half-stumbling step from the bed (Abby promised and you hold her opinion in the lowest regard) but with the brace on your leg and Octavia strong and sturdy under your arm, you feel like maybe not everything is hopeless.
“I think it’s gonna be okay,” Octavia looks at you, eyes bright and you have nothing in you to disagree.
/
Clarke comes back when you’re reading some old book you found tucked away in a corner, and she looks like she fought a losing battle with a mud puddle.
“Don’t tell my mom I’m back,” she whispers, and it’s just you in the med bay, but you nod (don’t break the silence).
“Where did you go?” You ask instead, and she looks at you (haunted).
“Everywhere.”
She doesn’t say another word.
/
It’s slow: learning to walk again. Clarke holds you now, and Octavia sometimes shoots you knowing looks above Clarke’s head.
But it’s not time for that, not when you wake up shuddering because you still think you can hear Finn screaming, you can feel flesh tearing away in your mouth. Clarke sleeps in the bed next to yours (I’m a healer, Raven, this is where I belong), except most nights she doesn’t sleep and you fall asleep to the scratching of the charcoal Lincoln brought her (wake up to Clarke staring at you with something like tenderness).
You spend most of your time with Clarke, leaning on her and she spends most of her time drawing, holding your hands, telling you about her life back in space.
Once, you asked her about your other leg, the one Murphy shot to hell and she just kind of shuts her mouth, shutters her eyes.
“Let’s focus on this one, Raven,” and you know that means I’m sorry.
/
Some days, she walks off into the woods (some days you wake up to her screaming) and then you spend your endless hours with Lincoln. He’s teaching you Trigedasleng and you’re teaching him your other languages, Spanish and Japanese. His pronunciation makes you laugh, and he says that your English accent when you speak Trigedasleng is horrible.
Sometimes he helps you stumble outside, sits with you against the side of the main building, or a tree and tells you about what it was like in Mount Weather (you once tried to tell him about being half killed over and over and over, try to tell him about sitting in pools of your own blood and knowing concretely that you are going to die, but the words don’t come).
He just nods and starts to tell you about the different flowers that bloom here; how his mother used to make tea from some of the blossoms.
Octavia joins you sometimes, her voice bright and painted over whatever gashes tore her lungs when she learned to kill.
She’s been learning to braid hair like Lincoln, and sometimes you let her practice on your hair (let Lincoln fix the snarls that Octavia somehow manages to put in every single time).
/
You fall asleep curled next to Clarke for the third night in a row; you wake up to her combing her fingers through your hair.
“I buried the dead,” she whispers, “and they fell apart in my hands.”
Her voice catches at the end, and you pull yourself up; sometimes you forget you are barely nineteen and Clarke just eighteen, sometimes you forget with all the dripping blood that once you were simply children.
“It’s summer now,” you say to her hip, “there should be flowers,” and Clarke tightens her fingers in your hair.
Everything, you remember, is spun-glass.
/
You go back to working with Wick after three months, and he raises his eyebrows at you.
“Wasn’t sure you were coming back, mechanic,” and you roll your eyes at him.
“What else was I gonna do? Sit around all day? I’ll leave that to you, thank you very much,” and he laughs.
You still use the counters more than you want to to get around, but the leg the Mountain Men drilled into is working (you can feel it, and when you concentrate you can move it okay). You never were going to be a runner anyways, and as long as you can still kind of walk, that’s all you’ve learned to care about.
Wick’s quiet sometimes, and when he looks at you, you know he’s seeing Raven on the Table, Raven Screaming, Raven Cut Open, Raven Desperate.
“I tried,” he says one morning, carefully looking away from you, “I tried to get them to take me instead,” and the words weigh heavy on his shoulders.
“I know,” you whisper, and when you kiss him, you taste something other than the blood; ghosts.
/
Once you liked to pretend that everything could go back to how it was on the Ark, but everything’s shuddered into some different.
You miss space more than you could ever imagine; that endless freedom and thrill of loss; you miss the chatter in Japanese with your neighbors, the Spanish with Lucy before spacewalks (everyone here speaks English and you miss the way your tongue twisted around other worlds); miss staying up all night with Finn talking (with Finn, with Finn, with Finn).
Clarke sometimes speaks something you vaguely recognize as Russian when she’s shouting at her mother; you speak Trigedasleng with Lincoln and Octavia and it’s as close to home as you’re going to get.
(Maybe, you think late one night curled against Clarke, maybe this is home now).
/
Clarke kisses you for the first time when you’re out in the field outside the gates; she’s golden and beautiful in the afternoon light. It’s something like pardon, something like a taste of an other and her hands are strong around your waist.
“I know,” she says into the space between your lips, “I know you’re with Wick,” and you kiss her quiet.
You can deal with all this later, but right now you want to taste Clarke so terribly alive.
Everything is sunshine and drips of blood; you close your eyes and let it wash over you.
/
She still doesn’t sleep at night (you think she’s drawing you) and you press a kiss to her hand that’s resting on your shoulder.
“It’s easier to face them,” you say, and she just shrugs.
“It’s easier not to see children falling apart when I sleep,” and there’s nothing you can really say to that.
/
Four months after: Lincoln’s Spanish is passable (his Japanese horrifying) and you start to work on his accent; your Trigedasleng still stumbles sometimes but Lincoln says you could pass as someone from closer to the ocean. Their accents, he says, sound closer to yours.
He teaches you how to swear in six different dialects and Octavia throws her head back and laughs.
Four months after: Wick still looks at you sometimes like you’re screaming, you kiss him to remind him you’re not. You kiss him to remind yourself you’re not; kiss him because you haven’t been left alone, because something in you is hopeful and bright.
Four months after: you let Clarke’s hazy gold sweep around your shoulders and fingers; she is so wonderfully alive. She sleeps every night by your side, and wake up with her lips on your cheek, your neck, your lips.
Four months after: you open your mouth and remember.