Work Text:
When my time comes
When I was young
I didn’t know too much
I thought that I could rule the world
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Clarke dreams of fire.
She dreams of the flames and the screams. The screams are a constant echo. They ring in her ears and in her mind. Her dreams always begin with the 300 Grounders at the Dropship. She stands near the Dropship door, pounding at it in an effort to be let inside and to escape her fate. She pounds harder and harder, tears making tracks down her cheeks before she hears the Dropship fire up. Finn and Bellamy are there with her, trying to drag her away from the Dropship but it is always too late. She watches as their skin melts from their bones in the flames and their bones burn, dropping into a charred and dusty pile. She drops to the ground and cradles their bones in her arms.
Then the scene flawlessly melts into Tondc after the missile. More blood on her hands.
But this time in Tondc no one survives. Not Octavia, not Lincoln and not even her mother. Tondc is worse. The remains aren’t charred bones that can be imagined to be something else. No, the bodies are there for her to see. Lincoln’s body is huddled over Octavia, desperate to protect her and his back is completely burnt and his spine is exposed. The flesh is barely clinging on. Octavia’s body is intact but her face is not. Her beautiful face is missing and Clarke can still smell the burnt hair. But the worst is her mother. Her mother is just lying there covered in burns and blood with her legs crushed under cement. Clarke’s holding back the tears and the screams building up in her throat. She’s seen this before. She knows this is the dream. Until she notices a new body next to her mother. It takes her a moment to realise the head is missing, having rolled further down the hill. She runs to it, desperate to reattach the head to its owner. She picks the burnt head up, the hair having been burnt away, but not even the burns are able to hide the identity of the head. Clarke lets out a scream and drops the head when she sees who it is. Lexa.
Tondc melts away once more and Lexa’s head is replaced with Maya’s. Maya who is covered in burns and is in Jasper’s arms. Clarke looks around the mess hall and the usual bodies have disappeared. In their place are the bodies of the children. Preschoolers are scattered across the hall, their tiny bodies covered in blistering burns. She had forgotten how small they were.
“You did this,” Jasper’s raspy voice calls out to her.
“Jasper please I had-”
“No,” he interrupts, “you didn’t. You didn’t have to kill the people who helped us. You didn’t have to kill Maya. You didn’t have to kill these tiny children,” Jasper croaks, his shoulders shaking with heavy sobs.
She reaches out to him and places her hand on his shoulder before he jerks away. “Jasper please.”
“When are you going to stop killing people Clarke? Aren’t your hands covered in enough blood as it is?” Jasper sobs and gestures to her hand.
Clarke looks down and a mortified scream escapes her lips. They’re covered in blood, thick and sticky. The blood isn’t restricted to her hands though and she looks to see her arms are covered to the shoulders. Clots are stuck to her jacket and she begins to wipe but none of it is coming off. Instead more blood appears and starts to smear at the rest of her body. She brushes and brushes but soon she is dripping and blood starts to fill the room. Jasper and the bodies have disappeared and it’s just her and the blood. Blood must have blood, blood must have blood, blood must have blood. The Grounder chant echoes throughout the room, the room filling more and more. Blood must have blood, blood must have blood, blood must have…
Clarke wakes with a start, a sob escaping her lips and the tears streaming down her face. She looks around at the cave she is in, relieved to see that there is no blood, no bodies and no fire. She looks at her hands, clean and clear, but she can feel the blood on them. They feel warm and sticky. She begins to rub her hands against her jacket as she lies back down, crying as she wills the feeling away and attempts to sleep once more.
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Murphy dreams of his feet dangling in the air as he struggles to lift his body up, the rope choking him. The rope burns his neck as his struggles but it does not burn as much as the pain of being punished for something he had not done. He hadn’t killed Wells. He hadn’t killed anyone. Did they hate him this much? Float him, float him, float him echoes throughout the forest but Murphy struggles to hear it, the blood pumping loudly in his ears while he struggles. Then he hears it.
“Murphy didn’t kill Wells! I did!” It’s the little girl Charlotte.
Relief rushes through him when he watches Clarke grab Bellamy’s hatchet and speed towards him, ready to cut him down. However his relief is short lived. The crowd holds Clarke back and she screams at them. “Murphy didn’t do it! Let me free him! We can’t kill him for something he didn’t do!” She shouts, her face growing red in anger as she shoves harder.
“He is cruel to us. He humiliates us. He pushes us around. We don’t want him here Clarke. He needs to die.”
Murphy struggles harder against the rope. They can’t do this. He didn’t do anything. Sure he’s an asshole but he hasn’t hurt anyone badly for this to happen. He kicks his feet but his vision is growing blurrier. He watches Clarke continue to struggle but she’s starting to fade. Everything is. Darkness is creeping in the corners and although he’s kicking he knows he’s going to die. He tries to lift himself one more time before everything goes black.
Murphy gasps for air when he wakes up, sitting up immediately and taking deep shuddering breaths. He looks across the bunker to where the scotch is sitting. He gets up and pours himself a glass, still breathing heavily and swearing that he can feel his neck burning from the rope. He drinks quickly and although he is relieved that he’s here in the bunker, safe, he suddenly feels so alone. Because even back at Camp Jaha, even at the Dropship, no one wanted him around.
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Lincoln dreams that he’s back in the mines with flesh caught in his teeth as he takes another bite at the body he had just dragged back. He chews happily on the raw flesh, the blood still warm from the recent kill. He looks at the other Reapers and they’re all content, happy to eat while they want for their next dosage. Just thinking of the dosage makes his body shudder with pleasure at the thought. Drifting back to his food, he looks down and notices the chest is still moving. Looks like he hadn’t killed his food after all. He raises his blade to finish the job when he hears it. The faintest of whispers coming from the body.
“Lincoln,” it whispers to him, “Lincoln please.” He rolls the body over and that’s when he realises. It’s Octavia. “Lincoln help me. Help me escape the mines. I don’t want to die here. I need to get back to the Ark, to the others. I need to get back to Bellamy,” Octavia begs, her eyes beginning to water.
Lincoln looks down at her, her bright eyes looking up at him with fear and pleading. He winds his hands in her dark hair and she smiles up at him. He smiles back at her and then he bites down hard on her neck, clenching his jaw until the blood rushes out and her screams are loud throughout the mines.
Lincoln growls when he is shaken awake, his eyes meeting Octavia’s instantly. She is smiling down at him and one hand is on his cheek while the other is on his shoulder. “Hey, hey you’re okay. It’s just a dream. I’m here and you’re safe,” she beams. Lincoln looks up at her and feels his heart clench within his chest. He’s terrified one day he’ll kill her.
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Jasper’s dreams always end the same way, no matter what he does. With Maya dying in his arms. Sometimes his friends are dead too, sometimes they’re not. But Maya always is.
Sometimes he gets to hold her as she dies, telling her how much he loves her and kissing her face or he’s telling her a joke so she has a smile on her face while she dies. That’s always the best case scenario for his dreams. Even the ones where he holds her while she’s already dead are some of the better dreams.
The worst ones are where he’s so close to saving her but he still fails. Such as the few times he actually manages to slice Cage’s neck and take out the guards in the room. But every time he gets to the mess hall it is too late and Clarke has already pulled the lever. Sometimes just before he leaves the others, he grabs one of the syringes that already have his friends’ bone marrow in it and he injects Maya straight in the neck with it, praying it will reverse the effect of the radiation and save her. But it never does. Instead it lets her die even slower, giving him more time to watch the life drain from her body and the spark disappear from her eyes.
But he thinks the absolute worst dream about Mount Weather is when he is locked out of the mess hall but he is able to watch them all sink to their knees as the radiation burns spread across their skin. He watches Maya in the centre collapse to the floor and watch the burns appear on her arms. He watches her, the one girl he thought could ever love him back, writhe in pain on the floor as she blisters and burns and she is no longer what he remembers her to be. Only when she is nearly dead do the doors open and he is able to rush to her. He embraces her tightly and kisses her skin.
“Maya I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay Jasper.”
“No it’s not.”
“None of us are innocent,” she whispers before her eyes go glassy.
Her words haunt Jasper even when he is awake and around the camp. Every person he looks at, her words echo in his mind. None of them were innocent. Not even him. But he still refuses to believe that Maya wasn’t an innocent. Not after what she did for them all.
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Monty walks around the camp, doing mindless chores to keep him distracted yet his mind still wanders back to everything. To the war with the Grounders and to Mount Weather. He had liked it better in the early days not long after they had landed in the Dropship. Their biggest crime then had been the petty things they’d been locked in the Skybox for.
Every day he looks at Jasper and how he isn’t the same. He is nothing but a shell that refuses to talk to any of them. Instead he pins them all with glares and stalks off to his tent to be on his own. Monty looks at how the others seem to be falling to pieces without Clarke. They either all seem too depressed to do much or they bicker at one another, blaming each other for the simplest of things. Raven lives in Communications area of the Ark, spending all her time there trying to improve the systems for them all or find some way that will allow to them to find Clarke somehow. Lincoln and Octavia seem to be the least damaged, yet they keep to themselves more, training each other in Grounder combat skills and now having conversations in Trigedasleng. However it’s Bellamy who gets to Monty the most. He goes on like nothing has happened and is instead trying to improve the Ark for them. He’s constantly talking with the council and working with the guard. He is doing everything he can to keep them safe, like on Mount Weather, and everyone is falling apart.
Monty doesn’t need to sleep to see his nightmares. He’s living them.
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Then I grew up
And found out life was hard
Harder than stone