Chapter Text
Clarke falls asleep as she has since Mount Weather, since walking away from her people: cold, dirty, hungry, and alone.
She tries not to think of words like martyr and penance. To do so would bring to mind an even more dangerous and impossible concept: absolution.
Clarke knows there is no forgiveness to earn, no one in this life or the next to exonerate her.
The backs of her eyes sting. She keeps them dry through sheer force of will, inhales through her nose, and begins the silent litany on an exhale.
Atom
The Grounder guard
Finn
Dante
Maya
She loses consciousness struggling to recall as many of the original 100 lost at the battle at the dropship as possible, of the 300 Grounders killed, of the people in Tondc, of the 250 Mount Weather inhabitants.
To say that she wakes up in an unfamiliar bed would be disingenuous. She recognizes it immediately, the familiar dips and springs, but writes it off as some figment of her imagination in her half-asleep state, along with the faint mechanical whirring.
Someone knocks, though, and there's no dismissing that.
Clarke jackknifes upright, sheet pooling in her lap, as she stares around her old bedroom on the Ark. And not the pathetic cot in her cell in the Sky Box, either, but home in a way Earth could never be.
"No," she says to herself, pressing her palms to the mattress, running her fingers along the seams of the bedding. "No no no. This isn't possible. This isn't real." She closes her eyes, counts to ten, but when she's done, everything is still there.
Her gaze darts around the room - her chess set folded neatly on a shelf, a cup of pencils, silly doodles and serious sketches scattered everywhere. Moving to kneel on the floor, she opens the drawer built into the bottom of her bed, rifling through her clothes, looking for anything that might be out of place.
Nothing stands out.
Her survey is interrupted by another, more impatient, knock.
"Yes?" she says, rising to her feet and pressing a palm to her spinning head, only to have her entire world fall off its axis when the door slides open.
"Hey, kid, let's get a move on," her dad says, smiling a bit, a piece of dark blonde hair falling across his forehead.
Clarke's throat tightens while her chest clenches hard, but she's never been happier. "Dad?" Her voice falters halfway through the word as she catapults into his arms. He's warm and solid against her and she presses her nose against his chest, breathing him in. She'd started to forget, she realizes now, how he smells, the sound of his voice, the exact shade of blue his eyes were. Are. "Is it really you?" she asks, clinging to him.
"Whoa, Clarke." He wraps his arms around her and squeezes. "What's wrong, sweetheart? Of course it's me. Who were you expecting?"
She trembles against him, fraught with emotion, while he makes comforting noises into her hair. "This can't be real, it can't be," she whispers hoarsely into his shirt, "but right now, I don't care. I don't care. You're alive."
He rubs one big hand down her back. "Must've been some dream to shake you up like this. I'm alive, Clarke. I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. Take a deep breath. There you go," he says when she follows his advice. "Another."
A single sob hiccups out of her, but she breathes slowly again and again, until her head clears. And, wonder of all wonder, her dad is still there. She leans back to look at him.
He tugs on a piece of hair framing her face and his smile is tinged with concern. "Better?" She nods. "Good. Do you want to talk about it?"
She thinks about it - thinks about letting it all spill out, from her mother's betrayal to his floating to Earth and what came after - but shakes her head instead. She's not going to waste whatever small amount of time she has with him. "Just a dream," she says, forcing a smile, wishing that was true, knowing that she's going to wake up at any moment, heartbroken.
Her dad stares at her for a long moment, then shrugs. "As long as you know I'm here if you change your mind." He looks wistful for a moment, brushing her hair aside. "I need to get in all the parenting I can before you leave me behind."
Clarke grabs his wrist with both hands, right over his watch - her watch - and leans her cheek into the cradle of his fingers. "I never want to leave you behind. Never."
"But it'll happen anyway," he says with a soft smile before he pulls his hand free. "Now, c'mon, I think you have just enough time for a quick protein pack before your shift in Medical."
"My shift, right," she says. Clarke wants to laugh at the idea of showing up for a predetermined amount of time, doing her duty, and then being free from that responsibility for hours. For the past few months, she's been on the clock - so to speak - nonstop. She's not able to completely repress the smile.
"That's a change. Normally you complain how boring it is this early in the morning."
She does laugh then, although it sounds brittle to her own ears. "I could use a little boring."
He gives her a quizzical look, but says only, "I'll let you get ready." She opens her mouth to stop him, wanting to bask in his presence, but he's through the door before she makes a sound.
Clarke tenses, certain once he's walked out that she's going to wake up.
She doesn't.
Exhaling slowly, she wanders around the room at her leisure, examining every detail to find the piece that doesn't fit, that will confirm this is some addled hallucination. Maybe she's been on her own too long or the foliage she'd found for her dinner the previous night had psychotropic properties. But... it doesn't feel like that, not like the jobi nuts did, like she was looking at the world through a warped pane of glass.
She runs her hand over the ledge jutting out from the wall that she always used as a catch-all for whatever small treasures she could find. A shallow tin holds her earrings, the family heirlooms her parents had given her for her fifteenth birthday. Beneath them rests a small silver ring, a plain band that Clarke has never seen before. Picking it up, she examines it, but beyond a slightly worn interior and a small scratch, it holds no clues.
Setting it back down, she rests her palm on the cover of a book, her thumb brushing the title imprinted on the spine: The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology. Although it doesn't seem like the kind of book she would read, it's most likely one she'd smuggled out of the library.
A smile tugs at her lips, nostalgic at the thought of an uncomplicated existence, where small rebellions were her only thrill and the most pressing problem had been the strain of apprenticing in her mother's area of expertise.
Clarke shakes her head, trying to reconcile the girl she'd been - privileged, dogmatic, naive, so certain of right and wrong, of black and white - with what she's become. If that young girl had heard the story of the the things Clarke has done over the past few months, she'd have branded the perpetrator a monster, the most vile of evils.
She wonders now if the urge to justify her actions only goes to prove that young Clarke would have been correct.
"Clarke!" her dad calls from another section of their flat and she jumps, swallowing hard as she's reminded that he's here with her again. "Five minutes!"
Shaking her head, she goes back to the drawer tucked into the bed and pulls out her familiar blue scrubs. The bottoms - always a little loose to begin with - gape at her waist alarmingly. She pinches the extra fabric and frowns. In reality, on the Ground, however she should refer to the life she's been living, she knows she's lost weight as a byproduct of stress and constantly being on the run for her and her people's lives. What confuses her is why her mind has manifested that here in this... reality? universe? dream?
Her dad drops something in the other room and she tucks the question away for now; odds are she'll wake up before she has time to think about it any further.
"Finally," he says when she walks through the door and she drinks in the miracle of him being here with her at all once more. He holds out her tablet along with a meal pack, which she accepts while trying not to wrinkle her nose. It's hard to be excited about Ark rations after she's tasted real, Earth-grown food.
Clarke heads toward the door of their flat with reluctant steps, before she hesitates. "Maybe I should stay home today. I'm sure Mom can get by without me." She smiles, warming up to her topic. "We could both play hooky and hang out. Relax."
Her dad stares at her like she's grown a second head. "Okay, who are you and where is my self-sacrificing daughter who always puts everyone else first?"
Wincing at the pang in her chest, she feels her smile falter around the edges. "It was just an idea," she says brightly. Too brightly, she thinks, as he narrows his eyes. Giving up the idea as lost, she walks towards the door again.
"Clarke," her dad calls and she turns to him. "Is there something you're not telling me?"
She's never been able to lie to her dad, so she settles for an ambiguous hum and waves at him. In the doorway, she stops. "Dad, if I ask you something, will you promise to answer me honestly?"
He looks hurt. "When have we ever been less than honest with each other?"
Clarke resists the urge to shift on her feet. "Is there a problem with the Ark life support? With the oxygen supply?"
"No," he says, eyes wide. "Why? Is there something you've heard?"
"No, no," she's quick to answer. "But maybe... could you just double check?"
An understanding look comes over him. "Does this have anything to do with the dream you had?"
She doesn't answer and he frowns at her. "I'll double check. But, honey, I really do think you should talk to someone about this. It doesn't have to be me."
"Thanks, Dad." She hesitates once more before leaving, terrified that as soon as she walks through the door, she'll wake up and he'll be gone again. "And Dad? I love you."
"I love you, too." He grins at her and jerks his chin. "Now get going before your mom has my head."
Clarke walks along the crowded hallway, wincing under the artificial light, trying to decide whether it or the ambient noise of the generators is going to give her a headache first. She sighs, impatient with herself. She grew up under these conditions and had only been on the Ground for a few short months, yet here she was acting as though this was some foreign environment.
She brushes past two guards, not sparing either a glance until one grabs her elbow. Jerking her gaze up in alarm, she gapes when she recognizes the face.
“Take out your ID chip,” Bellamy Blake says, his face set in stern lines. Turning to the other guard, he waves him on. “I’ve got this, go ahead and I’ll catch up.” The other guard shrugs and keeps moving, and Clarke lets Bellamy pull her out of the flow of traffic, into a quieter adjacent corridor.
She runs her eyes over him, his unmarred and familiar face, the dark blue uniform that complements him so well, his dark hair neater than she’d seen it since the dropship door opened the first time. He looks younger or perhaps just more unburdened. Clarke's stomach clenches when he turns his dark eyes back her way, suddenly remembering what he’d said. He wants to scan her ID chip, he doesn’t know her. In her younger years, she was unused to guards not recognizing her, but this is so much worse, because it’s Bellamy and in some ways, he knows her better than anyone else.
Swallowing around the catch in her throat, she pats down the pockets of her scrubs, wondering if she’d remembered to grab the chip out of habit. When she comes up empty, she opens her mouth to make excuses…
Just as a large hand cradles her jaw, tilting her face up to receive a kiss.