Chapter Text
Seen from just below the clouds, the planet is truly beautiful—even Octavia can admit as much. She hovers her cruiser there for several long minutes, wasting precious time, just to take it all in.
Long ridges of soft, emerald-green mountains slope down into valleys shimmering with star flowers, carpeted in jewel tones of red and blue and gold. Several large lakes sparkle in the sun. The strong rays of a clear afternoon glint with blinding force against the peaks and ripples of waves. To the far left, she can just make out the central land mass of the planet falling away against a tremendous and powerful ocean: a long, jagged beach of pure white-yellow sands, dotted with tall and rickety trees, their flat palm fronds swaying and bending in a tropical breeze. While the Northern hemisphere of the planet enjoys a long and balmy summer, the Southern half, currently beyond her view, has been blanketed in the softest winter snow.
Everyone says it’s one of the most beautiful spots in the galaxy. The second moon of Arkadia, official designation ARK-1002014. Better known as the Wedding Planet, after its sole industry: making gushy, gaudy, overblown, romantic dreams come true.
It's the last place Octavia would have guessed she'd find Josephine Lightbourne, the galaxy's most wanted, but all of her sources have led her here. So she'll take it. She needs the bounty, and maybe the last place anyone would look is the best place to hide.
Or maybe Josie’s a romantic, in addition to being a lying, cheating, murderous thief. Maybe she's been pulled in by the equally infamous Clarke Griffin's tall tales, and she thinks this gleaming viper's nest is where she'll find true love.
Octavia takes a deep breath, finally pulls her eyes away from the beautiful landscape unfurled so neatly beneath her, and starts to descend. She lands her cruiser in the brush of a small, wooded area, about an hour's walk from the Griffin Resort. The ship is thin and light, a silver so clear that it camouflages itself in almost any landscape, and she feels safe hiding it here while she nabs her prey. If she has any luck, it won't take long. Then she can leave this place behind her, fast.
The Resort is the most heavily populated area on the planet, little more than a village compared to the teeming cityscape where Octavia grew up, but a veritable urban paradise compared to the wilderness she has to trek through now. Even from this distance, she can make out the top story of the Resort building itself. It arches up over the trees in a round, bell shape, gilded a red-gold and shining in the sun. The rest of the building, she knows, puts even the grand tower on top to shame: a sprawling hotel of intricate design, meshing together the styles of every major alien culture in the galaxy into the most opulent monstrosity, spilling out into an even greater complex of gardens around the back, while its main entrance looks out upon the largest of the planet's lakes. The lake itself is ringed with the smaller cottages and cabins of Griffin's brigade of little wedding-fairy helpers. Her whole personal romance army.
Octavia's only seen the place in pictures. Even before she realized she'd be chasing Josie Lightbourne into hell, Wedding Planet propaganda is hard to avoid. Everybody in the galaxy wants to fall in love. So everyone in the galaxy is a target of the Griffin advertising machine.
What has made Clarke Griffin so obscenely successful, ranked her at the top of every list of the wealthy and powerful, is not the landscapes of her family's ancestral moon or even her famously impeccable event planning skills, but that she provides the wedding partner as well as the venue. Out of the most ancient village-art, matchmaking, she has created a giant, sanitized, robotic, corporate behemoth. A hand-tuned program that will find a person's one-true-love from anywhere in the galaxy. No one who signs up for her services is obligated to promise themselves in marriage to the first match the Romance-Bot spits out—but most people do. Over 98% of matches lead directly to weddings. All arranged, from first meeting to honeymoon, by Griffin herself.
Octavia rolls her eyes to herself. Think about it too hard, and it makes her sick. Think about it at all, and it makes her sick. She's known one true love in her life already, a love that burned fast and bright, then flamed out all at once like a shooting star. They didn't get married. Even if he'd lived, she doesn't think they ever would. And now she knows she'll never love as real or true or passionately as that again, and everything else... Everything else pales to nothingness in comparison. The weddings themselves are hollow spectacles. The marriages that follow probably simple farce.
Love isn't supposed to be forever anyway. And what comes after hurts too much to be worth the bother of trying.
Once she gets to the Resort, she figures she'll clean herself up a little and then poke around. See if anyone's seen or heard of Lightbourne, in a subtle, smart way. Information gathering like that is the least fun part of tracking down criminals—also the part she's worst at, if she's being quite honest with herself—but at this point, she has nothing better to go on. She's still hoping for some luck: her knife to Josie's throat and cuffs around her wrists by the end of the day.
Over an hour later, she finally gets the Resort in her sights, but, wanting to avoid any unnecessary encounters with the wrong people, she circles around the back. The building strikes an even more intimidating silhouette in person, a jigsaw puzzle for giants, dripping royal red and flickering with golden accents. It rises up and falls away in such unexpected twists and curves that her eye cannot focus on any one spot, and she feels slightly dizzy just taking it in.
The back of the building ripples in deeper shades of red and gold, several layers of grand balconies overlooking the famed Griffin Gardens. By some combination of science and, Octavia would bet, pure money and power, Clarke Griffin has found a way to grow almost any type of flora, even those sorts that should not be able to survive in the precise calm and balmy climate of the Arkadian moon. Octavia wanders through a corridor of desert plants—sleepy purple shrubs and spiky dun-green cacti—then slips through a tropical paradise, flush with overgrown leafy plants and vibrant orange and blue flowers, the air around her hot and humid, flickering with mist from deep-set sprinklers in the ground.
Beautiful enough. But it's the next garden that interests her the most, because from it, she can hear the sound of footsteps, and a voice humming a delicate tune.
Octavia crouches down and slips between two bushes that form part of the boundary of the garden, peering carefully through, her hand on the dagger at her hip.
She knows this place, or rather, she knows what it's meant to convey: a forest clearing on Alpha VI. That planet is known primarily for its short flowering trees, barely five feet high, with their jewel-like blossoms that curl and uncurl their petals all day long, and emit a gentle, airy song. Their trunks are spindly and weak, their roots barely settled beneath the ground, and in their native wind they bend and sway in elegant arcs, as if they were dancing. Planted on almost any other planet, subjected to any foreign elements, they are prone to falling and breaking apart as if made of glass.
A single tree from Alpha VI is worth more than Octavia has ever seen in her life. Griffin's got two dozen here at least, arrayed in two rows on either side of a clean dirt path, leading up to a simple wedding arch at the end of the lane. The arch has been decorated with a long string of lights, which shimmer in such a way that Octavia cannot help but squint to examine them more closely. Only then does she notice that the lights are tiny candles, flickering with open flames.
The sound of both footsteps and humming has stopped. Now the person, the only other person in the garden but for Octavia herself, the naive and innocent person who believes herself all alone and unobserved, has come to a stop halfway down the aisle, next to the trees on the opposite side of the lane. She stands with her back to Octavia and her head slightly tilted, her long golden-blonde hair falling in waves over her shoulders.
That distinctive shade of gold.
She's the right height and build too, has something confident and almost cocky in her stance that rings deeply familiar, and somewhere in her gut Octavia just knows. She's found her. She's found her prey, Josephine Lightbourne, at last.
Without thinking any more thoroughly than that, she launches herself from the bushes, pulls her dagger from its sheath, and jumps on Josie from behind, blade to her neck.
A moment later, she feels a powerful elbow to her gut, which knocks her back—Lightbourne turns and grabs for the wrist with the knife, and Octavia gets her in the kidney with her other fist. Too soon and just as fast, that arm is immobilized too, and then she can only struggle to keep herself upright and at some level of advantage, as she and her opponent become locked in an awkward, stiff-armed bout. She takes a misstep backwards and loses her balance, but Lightbourne's grip on her wrists is still so tight that at least, when Octavia falls, she takes them both down at once—
And they crash down together in an undignified pile, on the ruins of one of the Alpha trees, coughing up dirt.
She loses her grip on her knife. All around her is the sound of rhythmic thuds and cracked music notes and something like the chime of breaking glass. Then, at some distance, a whoosh as if of flame. But she can't open her eyes for the dust.
When she does manage to blink them open, she's got a blade edging against the bare skin of her throat, and she's looking up into the livid face of a woman who, whatever her flaws, is not ranked anywhere on the galaxy's most wanted list.
"You're not Josephine Lightbourne," she manages, coughing up the worst of the dust from her lungs.
"Why would I be Josephine fucking Lightbourne?" Clarke Griffin answers. She spits out a strand of hair that's caught between her lips, clambers up to her feet and lets Octavia go, but keeps the knife gripped tight and aimed for Octavia's throat.
"Because she's supposed to be on this planet!" Octavia rises to her feet with as much dignity as she can manage, makes a brief grab for the knife, but Clarke only tips the point forward until it barely pierces skin. Octavia's voice dips lower. "And you look just like her from behind."
"So you attack first and ask questions later?" Clarke laughs, dark and humorless. "Good plan. Congratulations. You've been played. You better hope there's some other famous criminal lurking on these grounds because that's the only way you're going to be able to pay for all this damage you've caused." Her tone never rises above a deep, threatening hum, though on the word damage, she throws Octavia's knife haphazardly into the dirt, as if for that one moment unable to hold down the violence in her rage.
Octavia loses the last of her dignity scrambling to pick up the weapon again, but at least she no longer has a blade primed against her jugular.
"I'm not paying for any damage," she says. "And—what do you mean I've been played?"
Clarke crosses her arms tight against her chest. "I mean Josephine Lightbourne isn't here and never was. She was caught by a bounty hunter yesterday on Bardo. It's all over the news. And yes, you are paying for the damage. You knocked over four Alphan trees and set a priceless wedding arch on fire."
She gestures to her left with her chin, and Octavia glances over despite herself. Two beetle robots have already uncurled their spindly legs and walked over to put out the fire, but the arch itself is scorched beyond repair. The tree that she and Clarke crashed into, and the three others between it and the arch, have fallen like dominoes, their delicate flowers crushed into the ground.
"We knocked them over," she argues, after a long beat, and pretends her face isn't burning red.
"You knocked them over," Clarke answers, and this time punctuates her words with a stiff pointer finger right to Octavia's chest.
"Well I'm not paying for them. I don't have the money, and you have plenty."
That's what it comes down to, after all. Clarke can poke at her all day, can use that snide, commanding tone with her all she wants, but Octavia isn't magically going to have more credits than she does, or fewer debts than she does, and that's all there is to it.
"That's your problem," Clarke says simply, and turns on her heel and starts walking away.
She walks like a stuck-up princess, just like she sounds: heel-to-toe, with her shoulders all the way back and her nose in the air. Octavia supposes that she's meant to follow her, to make some sort of deal or at least grovel for forgiveness, but she has too much pride for that. She shoves her knife back in its sheath, fixes her hair and straightens her jacket, sticks her own nose up and starts walking in the other direction, away from this useless place and back towards the safety of her ship.
Her cruiser is carefully hidden away right where she left it, in the forest an hour outside the Resort. She climbs into the pilot's seat and turns it on.
It whines as if straining to come to life, then something inside makes a deep clunking sound, and the dash screen fizzes out to black.
Octavia doesn't reach the Resort again until after dark. When she finally stumbles into the lobby, sticky with sweat and streaked with dirt, red from exertion and out of breath, the shiny teal hospitality robot behind the main desk only tilts its stupid round head to the side and stares at her. Then it politely directs her downstairs. She doesn't even get a chance to demand an audience.
But she thanks it anyway, wipes the worst of the gunk from her face, and slips through a stone archway to a staircase that leads down, and down, and down.
Deep beneath the Resort, a cavernous room opens up, something like a restaurant or maybe a club, dark but for a myriad of sparklers set in beveled crystal glasses among the tables. An underground spring rises up in the corner and fills a large stone pool. Rippling blue-green lights reflect from it and pass along the stone walls, picking out gleams of water on the uneven gray-brown surface. From somewhere unseen, an eerie but beautiful ocean tune is playing, a sound of wind and waves and an echoing, haunting voice singing in a language Octavia doesn't know.
Almost every table is occupied, and Resort employees and mechanical trays flit like ghosts between them. Still, it's not hard to find Clarke among the crowd. Her table isn't front and center, but it feels like the most important one in the room. Like somehow all signs always point to her.
She's drinking a misty rose-tinted drink, straight from its tall and tapered bottle, and playing cards with a man Octavia almost recognizes, but not quite. Octavia's ready to slap the cards right from her hands—but with great restraint, she settles for leaning with both palms flat on the tabletop and snarling, "What the fuck did you to my ship?"
Clarke's eyes flick up to her, then across at her friend. Even when she smiles, she's infuriating. He smiles back, and it's like a secret code shared between the two, though his is warmer and more forgiving by its nature.
"What did you do to my Alphan trees and wedding arch?" she counters. "When I'm compensated for them, you'll get your ship."
"I told you that I don't have the money. You can't just—" Her hands clutch hard around the heavy stone edge of the table. Even trying to keep her voice down to a low and threatening hiss, she sounds wild in the refined quiet of the room. Almost obscene. "How did you even know where it was?"
"Your cruiser? Octavia Blake, do you think anyone comes onto my planet without me knowing exactly who they are and where they are?"
"She's got you there," the man says, laughing. His voice is warm and smooth, full of a fondness that gets under Octavia's skin.
She ignores him.
"Well if you let me leave, you won't have to worry about me taking up place on your precious moon."
Clarke shrugs, doesn't even deign to look up as Octavia raves. She flips one of her cards over, adding it to the pile of face-up cards that have accumulated between her and her friend. A queen. Then she adds to it. Four more queens.
The man throws his own cards down in a huff, but he's grinning and shaking his head, laughing under his breath—like he loses to her all the time but he's glad for it. "All right, all right," he says, reaching out to gather the whole lot. "Got me again. I gotta go anyway."
"Still insisting on leaving early?" Clarke asks, disappointed, as she leans back in her chair and watches him.
"My father's expecting me." He pushes the cards, now a neat and orderly pile, back to her side of the table. Then, so fast that Octavia almost misses the gesture, he reaches for Clarke's hand and gives it a tight squeeze. And then he's gone.
Octavia opens her mouth to speak, figures she'll ask what the hell that was and then get back down to the business of being righteously irate, but Clarke doesn't give her the chance. She points with her chin at the abandoned seat. "You play?"
"What?"
She kicks the leg of the chair, so it scuds across the floor in Octavia's direction. "Sit. Do you play?"
Of course she plays. "Factora VIII invented this game. I used to play every Friday night—ran circles around the whole street."
"Good, then this will be fun." She starts dealing before Octavia even sits down, and though for a moment, she thought she discerned a flicker of a genuine smile on Clarke's face, now she seems again as cold and as hard as the gleaming rock walls of the room. Octavia can't imagine Clarke’s ever truly had fun in her life.
"House rules. Aces low. If I win, you pay off your debt to me by working in the Resort. If you win, I'll forgive the debt and return the part you need for your ship."
Octavia holds up her palms to keep the cards from scattering off the table and when she's got her hand, she arranges it neatly into a face-down pile in front of her. Her breathing has slowed down now, and in the quiet where the rage of her own thoughts once was, in the calm that rests on the water music and the splash and trickle of the fountain, and the steady conversations all around them in a variety of tongues, she feels a certainty that feels almost like peace. Hardly a familiar feeling. Clarke is watching her patiently from across the table. The fizzes of light from the sparklers send specks and flickers of gold across her cheekbones, catch sometimes in the clear ocean-blue of her eyes.
Her expression is completely opaque, her features beautiful like a statue's are beautiful, and anything real or true in her is closed off behind layers and layers of stone. Octavia remembers how, a minute ago, Clarke smiled when her friend smiled, how she seemed sad and lost the moment when he left. Her one, solitary clue to the woman sitting across from her.
Clarke takes another drink from the bottle next to her. "So?" she asks.
A brief hint of impatience. Another clue, for what it's worth.
“It’s a deal," she says, and flips over her cards.
At first, the silence between them helps to soothe the last vestiges of her anger, and the familiar tradition of the game takes her out of herself and the world of trouble she's found herself in. When she wins, she'll be exactly where she was before she even heard Josephine Lightbourne's cursed name. No better and no worse. By herself, reliant on herself, beholden to no one—this joke of a planet just another speck of dust in her wake.
But the longer the game goes on, the more entrenched the stalemate between them—Octavia up this round and Clarke the next—the more her mind begins to wander and her palms to sweat. Clarke's good. And she has an unflappable patience, like she's settled into a familiar pattern, as if the stakes of this encounter were nothing and she's got nothing to prove.
Which, Octavia supposes, is true.
To try to trip her up, she starts a conversation.
"What are you going to do about that wedding?" she asks. "Postpone it? Nix the trees?"
Clarke's eyes narrow, as if she took the question as a taunt. "Of course not. We keep our promises here." She moves one of her cards from the far left of her hand to the far right, her tongue briefly caught between her teeth. "I called in some favors. Some expensive favors. But the wedding will go on tomorrow." She pauses, then adds, arch, "As I'm sure you'll be here to see."
She'd like to answer, Eat my dust, Griffin, but her rage has already proven useless here. So instead, she observes, "You're really into all this stuff, aren't you?"
"What do you mean?"
"Weddings. Matchmaking. Romance. True love, or whatever bullshit."
"You think true love is bullshit?"
"I asked you first."
Clarke hums, her eyebrows rising briefly up, as if she were very slightly and inconsequentially surprised, or making some sort of note in her head. Then she sits back in her seat. "I take it you don't believe that functional, happy marriages can be arranged. Or is that they can't be arranged by a machine? Or is it the true love element that's so hard to believe?"
Octavia grits her teeth. "It's all of it," she answers. "And the way you sell it all in one piece. An infallible machine finds a perfect match, the love of your life, and it's all fairy tales and flowers and... wedding arches and Alphan trees and summer days. It's all clean and neat. No passion and no emotion, or at least not the kind of emotions you can't package and put on a billboard somewhere. Not the messy kind." She cuts herself off on a hard inhale, swigs from Clarke's bottle so that the smoke burns in her throat, then adds in a tight, clipped tone: "But you still haven't answered my question."
Maybe her skin wouldn't be burning so hot if she weren't sitting right next to the sparklers' flame, if she hadn't just recently trekked through the woods for the third time in one day—if Clarke weren't watching her with that steady gaze, not like she could see right through her, but like she's judging every thought and feeling Octavia has let loose across her face.
Clarke reaches out for another card, then hesitates, flicking at the corner instead with just her thumb. "How about we up the stakes?" she says. That isn't an answer either, but all Octavia can do is roll her eyes and ask:
"How?"
"If I win, you'll pay your debt to me, and you'll give my program a try. See if you can't find someone you want to marry. See how it really works."
"And if I win?"
"Then I answer your question. I'll tell you what I really think."
Octavia scoffs. "That hardly seems like a fair deal. I might have to pledge myself in marriage to someone I've never met but all that's at stake for you is having to answer a simple question. It shouldn't be that hard, Clarke."
"Then don't lose," she snaps, but before Octavia can even gloat about that nerve so clearly hit, she relents. "Fine. If I win, you stay here on Ark-one-hundred until your debt is paid or you find someone you want to marry, whichever comes first. If you win, you're free to go, and I'll answer whatever questions you want."
It's not the worst deal she's ever heard. She'll never find a spouse through some stupid artificial intelligence machine, but maybe if she can fake it, she can get out of spending the rest of her life paying off the price of a few stupid plants. She'll just have to get Clarke to discharge the debt before any official marriage documents are signed. Worst case scenario, she has an escape hatch.
Best case scenario, they end this right now. One hand left. If she wins, she'll be out of here tonight.
"All right," she says, and Clarke flips up her card and adds it to her hand.
Octavia has a solid hand: not much other than a straight run of queens and kings could beat it. She lays it down on the table between them with a gloating smile, barely held back.
Clarke doesn't smile at all as she arrays her cards opposite Octavia's.
King and queens, every single one. Royalty all the way down.
She does arch her eyebrow though, and quirk the corner of her mouth up, even as Octavia's stomach sinks down to her boots. "I'll get you a room," she says. "On me. We start work early in the morning."
The wedding that she almost ruined goes off without a hitch, and the reception after trails on through the long afternoon and into the night, while Octavia serves drinks and collects a mountain's worth of empty plates from the tables. The groom gives a speech about his utter confidence in their union. He and the bride have only met a half dozen times. Just like his parents and his grandparents, he says; he's the generation that bridges the gap between the ancient customs of the past and the advances of the future.
Octavia doesn't feel like she's advancing toward the future when, on her third day on the planet, she meets the patented Griffin intelligence that will decide her fate. The AI lives in a partially humanoid robot, rose-gold with round ball joints and a slightly pointed head. They sit together in a greenhouse that sparkles with glints of rainbow light and smells of soothing deep-green. The robot asks her questions, simple at first. Then deeper, probing. Despite herself, she answers with a calm honesty, not because this isn't bull, but because she's not invested enough to lie. She talks about her childhood and her family, her future, her dreams, such as they are. She even talks about Lincoln, though she regrets every word. The robot takes all her wants and needs and desires and collects them all in neat data lines, somewhere deep inside itself, humming and clicking in the pauses, while Octavia stares up at the sky through the glass. If she wanted love, maybe this would be a place to find it. Certainly, flitting along through the galaxy as she does, she'll never find it anywhere else again.
The robot inclines its narrow, pointed head as in in sympathy, and even though by now she has nothing else to say, she thinks she'd like to spend hours here, still, in the calm and the sun, feeling a warmth she's long forgotten glowing on her skin.
Octavia assumes she'll meet her future spouse right away. Yet days pass without any news because, as Clarke tells her, "these things take time."
"How much time?" Octavia asks.
Clarke shoots her a look, withering and impatient. "Time," she repeats, and dumps a tangled string of blinking fairy lights into Octavia's arms.
She herself is currently engaged in sorting through a large table's worth of crystalline glassware, which clangs and tings in a delicate and nerve-inducing way every time a diamond shaped bowl hits a circular glass, or a utensil knocks against a thick, square plate. Currently, the giant ballroom on the second floor of the Resort is in a monstrous disarray. Clarke and Octavia stand in the middle of it, their voices echoing beneath the impossible vault of the ceiling, at sea amidst the scattered furniture, cables, ornaments, and papers that litter the room.
This is the chaos, Octavia has already learned, that comes in the days before a wedding or, in this case, a reception.
"I thought this whole process was supposed to be efficient," she grumbles, as she sits down heavily in one of the chairs. The straggly ends of the fairy lights trail along the floor around her. She kicks a stray bit out of her way while she searches for the off switch. The strobe-like blinking of the lights doesn't bother her much, since they send out colors on an end of the spectrum she can't see. But the constant flapping of the mechanical fairy wings makes untangling the mess nearly impossible.
"It's more efficient than the alternative," Clarke answers, not bothering to look up. She sighs wearily. A few stray strands of hair have come loose from her braid, tickling lightly against her cheek and chin.
Octavia watches her silently, steadily. Her fingers work apart the knots in the cables of light.
"So what am I supposed to do," she asks, after a moment, "when this person shows up? Start picking out a color scheme for the wedding?"
"Spend time with them," Clarke says. She pauses a moment, a faint wrinkle disturbing the smooth line of her brow, then picks out a spoon and holds it up to the light. "All you have to do is approach it with an open mind. In good faith. Take whatever time you need, and if the two of you decide the match isn't a good one—then I suppose you've proven your point."
"Good for me. But if there's no wedding, I still have to pay for your trees."
"Yes," Clarke agrees lightly, polishing invisible imperfections from the spoon until it gleams. She holds it up to the light again, but spares Octavia a glance. "You still have to pay for my trees."
So she waits, and she works, and she pays for the trees.
Most days, she works not at the business of fairy tale creation, but at the business of Resort upkeep. She helps clean. She greets the guests. She gives directions. When Clarke finds out she can sew, she helps to customize wedding dresses and contributes the 'handmade' to 'handmade tablecloths' and 'handmade curtains.' For days on end, she sees Clarke rarely or not at all. She befriends the other human and alien staff and learns the quirks of the various hospitality robots who roam the grounds.
Sometimes, Clarke enlists her in the comparatively more exciting work of putting together an actual wedding, and on those days, Clarke herself is always around. She is, Octavia is not surprised to learn, a micromanager. She takes full responsibility for every detail of every event, and so she is there, supervising, overseeing, directing, double-checking, and contributing to every aspect from the most overarching to the most mundane. Octavia's never seen anyone work harder, unless perhaps she counts her mother and her brother, who ran themselves into the ground just trying to survive in the city.
Clarke's boundless energy and never-ending, unfiltered opinions annoy her, mostly. But a part of her admires those irritating qualities too. Admires, despite herself, how Clarke truly cares—how she's thrown herself into the most unimportant task in the galaxy, yet she's thrown herself in completely, how she does nothing by half, how she is so unwavering in her devotion to the business that it might as well be the most serious vocation. How she beams with pride when a wedding goes off without a hitch and the newlyweds are happy.
How she lights up when she sees she's made other people happy.
For a few minutes, then, everything seems worth it, a moment of perfection Octavia and all the other worker bees can revel in along with Clarke, a moment of perfection they've built together, one they now hold softly in their hands.
Clarke isn't an easy boss, but Octavia's had worse. In addition to her stringent perfectionism, her imperious tones, her rigidity, she has almost no sense of humor, and even less so when a deadline is near at hand. She almost never laughs or jokes, not even to break the tension of a long and busy day.
She smiles often, though. Every bit of praise wrung from her is well-earned, but it comes, always, with that soft and gentle smile: a natural glow across her face, a contentedness and pure happiness radiating from her, and a sense of camaraderie too. Clarke smiles and suddenly you're in this together, and it doesn't even matter what this is: the glow suffuses those around her, too.
Octavia feels it, warm inside her chest, even when Clarke isn't smiling at her.
She earns her first real praise only after she's been at the Resort nearly a month. She's been tasked with heading up preparations for a traditional Trishan forest wedding, beginning with hanging up large, intricate beaded curtains between the trees in the clearing where the ceremony will take place. The curtains are delicate and unwieldy, and she has to take them down and put them up multiple times before they'll hang just right.
When she's finished, she crosses her arms against her chest, tilts her head back, and lets the sweat drip in rivulets between her shoulder blades and past her temples, feeling the pale-yellow rays of the sun falling over her, listening to the persistent buzz of fat insects in the woods and simply letting herself be proud.
"You did a good job," Clarke says, from somewhere behind her, and Octavia jumps.
"How long have you been here?"
"Not long. Just checking in. It's looking really great." She steps up closer, and Octavia lets some of the tension fall from her shoulders again.
She makes a low humming noise, if not a thanks, at least an acknowledgment or an assent. It's been longer than she can remember since someone's complimented her like that. She hardly knows what to do with the words when she hears them. She hardly even knows how to feel. Then Clarke touches her back briefly, and smiles over at her—that familiar golden Clarke smile, except this time it’s only for her. The curl of her lips makes Octavia wonder if this is some secret between them. This moment, whatever it is.
"I guess you're not so clumsy after all," Clarke adds. It's the first joke Octavia's ever heard her make, and it comes with a wicked glint in her eye that makes Octavia's stomach twist itself into a knot.
"Of course I'm not," she answers, and squares her shoulders up toward her ears. The words come out in a huff. Clarke's smile grows unaccountably wider, as if for once she was on the verge of laughter.
The expression is simultaneously incredibly irritating and incredibly cute.
Octavia averts her eyes quickly, hoping Clarke has not noticed the deepening blush that shades across her cheeks.
Afterwards, Octavia starts cataloguing in her mind every time she and Clarke work together and alone. She likes those day best, for reasons she can't explain, and they seem to come more frequently now as the summer builds toward its brilliant height.
One afternoon, they sit together by the side of the lake, their shoes off and their pant legs rolled up to their knees, and test out various silver boat ornaments that Clarke has pulled from storage. They're for a wedding that won't take place for several months yet, so the task is lazy, and beneath the sizzle of the sun they become drowsy and quiet.
Octavia shields her eyes with her hand as, with the other, she sends one of the boats off from the shore. If it floats for at least ten minutes, it will do. Otherwise, she'll chuck it in the pile destined for repairs. As she watches it float along, bobbing serenely along the calm blue ripples of the water, she remembers racing paper boats along the gutters after a heavy rain back home, years ago when she and Bellamy were kids.
"There aren't any lakes where I grew up," she says, barely even aware that she's spoken the words aloud until Clarke looks up at her.
"Factora VIII, right?" she asks.
Octavia's eyes narrow. She's about to ask how Clarke knows, but Clarke beats her to it.
"You mentioned it on the day we met. It's mostly city sprawl out there, right?"
"Mostly."
Clarke is fiddling with one of the broken boats. Octavia's not sure what she's trying to accomplish, but she seems to be making the situation worse.
"I've never been to any of the planets in that system," Clarke says.
"I wouldn't bother with any of the others," Octavia says. "They're not habitable." Then, after a moment's thought: "Factora VIII is only sort of habitable. Most people I've met couldn't handle that life. They'd probably get lost trying to navigate the streets, first off. Or they'd be too scared to function. The people who live there, they aren't too friendly, and the place is overrun. Everyone—everyone's from all over, you know, you got Factorans like me, plus the most down-and-out, desperate, and unlucky of every other system, but in a way everyone's the same."
"Tough," Clarke supplies. "The survival of the fittest."
"You would."
Clarke frowns, confused, and Octavia shrugs and kicks her feet through the water. She hadn't meant to say it, and she hates having to say it again. "You could survive out there. Not that you'd ever have to."
"Maybe," Clarke concedes. Her tone strikes Octavia as one of false modesty, which is beneath her, and she snorts. "Where I grew up is pretty different, though."
"Obviously. Arkadia, right?"
Clarke shakes her head. She stares out across the lake, watching Octavia's boat describe a large circle in the water. "Nope. Alpha VI."
"Really?" She raises her eyebrows, so honestly surprised that she does not hesitate to look Clarke directly in the eye. "But the Griffins are basically the most famous Arkadian family there is." That, she needn't add, is how Clarke ended up the sole proprietor of a whole moon.
"My dad's Arkadian," Clarke answers. "But my parents divorced when I was little and afterward my mom moved me to Alpha VI. It's beautiful, if you've never been. The trees are the most famous but most of the plant life there, you can't even pretend like you can take it from the planet. It won't survive anymore else. Not a lot of available exports." She kicks her feet through the water, sending up an unexpected splash. "A lot of tourists though."
"Great for making connections, I guess."
"Mmm. Griffin names helps too."
Octavia lets that information settle slowly in her mind, lets it filter down like a heavy object sinking down into the lakebed sand. Alpha VI isn't as wealthy as Arkadia. But it's no Factora VIII. Clarke's childhood was odder, perhaps, than she'd assumed, but no less charmed.
"So your parents divorced," she says finally, slowly. "And yet you still believe in happily-ever-after marriages?"
Clarke dips her head. The sun glints streaks of gold through the waves her hair. "I believe in happily-ever-after when it's the right person. When you belong together and you know it, and you devote yourself to it."
Which part of the test did her parents fail? Octavia wonders. The part where they should have belonged together, or the part where they didn't work hard enough? The part where their union wasn't created by some infallible machine?
Is that the only kind of marriage Clarke trusts anymore?
But instead she asks, "What about your marriage?" She thinks back to the card game, the slick underground room and the dashes of light shooting out from the sparklers, the glints of light from the fountain reflecting off the walls. The man across from Clarke, so familiar even in the dim. "Is your husband the 'right person'?"
Clarke's brow furrows, and she picks up the broken boat again and uselessly tugs and yanks at its seams, as if she thought she could pry it open and find the mechanism underneath. "I'm not married," she says. Octavia's never heard a person try that hard to sound casual yet fail so utterly. "Why did you think I was?"
"I just assumed. It seems weird for someone in your line of work to be single."
"You must have noticed how busy I am. I don't exactly have time for a relationship."
"Right." Octavia nods sagely. What a crock of bullshit. "Just like you said, I guess. These things take time."
Clarke hears the subtle mockery in Octavia's tone, scowls briefly but hides the expression as frustration at the boat, then tosses it on the repair pile and announces imperiously, "We don't have to talk about this again."
And for a long while, they don't.
Octavia is surprised when Clarke invites her to be part of a small team setting up a wedding in the Southern Hemisphere—even more so that the invitation comes as an abrupt order one morning after breakfast. But when Clarke gives orders, she leaves no choice but to follow. So Octavia finishes her bowl of fruit and then returns to her room to pack her bag
The last time she found herself in a snowscape, she was chasing down a lowlife scum named McCreary, who'd hidden himself on a lawless ice planet devoid of just about everything but snow drifts, desolate winds, and some sort of animals that howled mournfully all night long. It was just about the most miserable place in the galaxy. Definitely the loneliest, too.
Winter on the Wedding Planet is a little different. Cozy cabins of different shapes and sizes dot a landscape of ancient, low-sloping mountains and narrow, iced-silver lakes. Fewer people live here than around the Resort itself, and yet a certain cheery industriousness pervades the little town: smoke curling up from the houses, well-cleared paths connecting each door to the next. The villagers come out to greet Clarke as soon as her shuttle lands, and before Octavia can even take a breath of the icy, raw air, a mug of something warm and deep-smelling and richly dark is being thrust beneath her chin.
She hates to admit, but damn if it isn't true: it's hard to be surly in an atmosphere like this.
Somehow, Clarke manages it, though.
"You're in a bad mood today," she notes, as she sits down on the sofa in the living room of the sprawling chalet where she, Clarke, and the rest of the workers—and the couple of honor in a few weeks' time—will be staying.
"We just have a lot to do," Clarke answers. She's already started opening the boxes of supplies they've hauled with them from the Resort. "Are you going to help with this or not?"
"I will," Octavia promises. But she makes no move toward actually standing up. She just watches Clarke, patiently, lazily. For weeks now, she's felt like Clarke is a language she's made leaps and bounds in learning. Now all of a sudden, she's been shut out again, and all her fluency is gone.
It makes her regret every bit of honesty she's shown, every scrap of vulnerability she's allowed Clarke to see.
Abruptly, she slides to the edge of the couch, grabs the nearest box, and opens it. Too much contemplation gives her nervous energy. She paws through random bits of fabric, most of which are scratchy and unpleasant to the skin. Seems like garbage mostly. She should ask why they even brought this stuff, but before she can, she comes across a square of beautiful white lace and a random flash of inspiration strikes. Her mother would have sold their home for even half a bolt of fabric like this. Octavia traces her fingers over the delicate tendrils and curls, as if she were memorizing it, or reading some hidden message in the details of the texture against her skin.
She stands up slowly, the fabric still in her hands. Doesn't say a word. Even in her thick-soled boots, her feet make no sound against the plush white carpet.
When she's right behind Clarke, she pounces—
"What the—" Clarke yells, and for a moment it's just like their first meeting, except Octavia is laughing, they both stay upright, if only barely, and when Clarke catches her balance again, she's twisted around in Octavia's arms and face to face with her.
Somehow, she looks even more livid than she did when Octavia destroyed her trees.
"This isn't funny," she seethes.
But Octavia thinks it's very funny indeed. She has Clarke properly trapped, so close that they are almost nose to nose. If Clarke stepped backward, she'd hit the table crowded with boxes. If Octavia lost her balance, she'd fall back into an overstuffed, soft blue chair.
She loosens her embrace just enough to take the square of lace and balance it awkwardly on top of Clarke's head. "There," she announces. "Your reputation problem is solved. Now you're a bride."
A beautiful bride, she thinks, her smile fading as she glances finally at Clarke's eyes. They shine back at her steadily, a hypnotic, crystalline blue. Her cheeks are dusted with the lightest pink, spots of angry, or embarrassed, or simply passionate red high on her cheekbones. Her hair is very slightly in disarray.
All of a sudden, Octavia can't remember what was funny a moment ago, and she understands very well why Clarke’s not laughing.
"I don't have a reputation problem," Clarke says, which seems like absolutely the least important comment she could make.
"Yeah, you do. You can match up just about anyone, right? Except yourself." Her words are nearly breathless, so quiet that's she glad she and Clarke are close enough for her to hear the gentle exhale of them, Octavia's breath hitting against her cheek and lips. "And maybe me."
"That's not—" Clarke says again, and Octavia has no idea what she was going to try to argue, because she stretches her neck forward and abruptly kisses Clarke right on the mouth. The gesture is so sudden it surprises even her. Clarke seems not only surprised but utterly stunned, stands there without moving, without either kissing back or pulling away.
Vaguely, Octavia is aware of the scrap of fabric falling to the floor.
She jerks back, her own lips parted, her own eyes open wide and shining.
"Why the fuck did you do that?" Clarke murmurs. Whatever effort she might have put into them, there's no rancor in her words at all.
"I—guess because you're so beautiful. And like I said, you're a bride. And brides should be kissed." She tries to smile, briefly reaches up as if to sweep Clarke's hair from her face, but at the gesture Clarke yanks herself back and out of Octavia's arms. Her legs hit hard against the table edge, a dull thump disrupting the silence.
"And I told you I'm not the bride," she snaps, and pushes past Octavia, heading toward the door. Only after she's left, and the door has banged shut behind her, does Octavia realize she'd said no such thing. She didn’t have to. It's been hanging in the air between them all this time.