Chapter Text
“Onward, O sons of Greece, come, free the land
...liberate your wives and children;
free the tombs of ancestors and temple-homes
of native gods.”
Aeschylus, Seven Against Thebes
There is no warning; she merely disappears into the night. The next morning, Sinclair is led into the cell with his hands zip-tied behind his back — there are too many prisoners now, and too few handcuffs. Kane looks up at him from where he sits stiff-backed and sore-hipped on the concrete floor, eyeing the guard warily as the zip-tie is sliced open through the gap between Sinclair’s wrists.
No one has been outright sentenced to execution as of yet, but he has heard of the deaths.
“She’s gone,” Sinclair says, dropping down next to him. His eyes are ringed with deep purple bruises of exhaustion, weariness stamped deep into his face. Marcus Kane, who has spent the past five months sleeping on the floor in a cell populated by no fewer than two dozen other souls at any given time, can relate. They have all had their trials (or, as he surveys the many others imprisoned with him — a lack of legal process) since Pike declared total war on the Grounder population and disabled the front gate of Arkadia.
So at first, he is only shocked that someone has managed to escape Pike’s rounds of patrols and the view of the tall spire at the middle of camp, his guards’ panopticon.
“How?” he asks. Then, his brain clicking through into the next gear, a jolt of adrenaline pierces his stomach. “Who’s gone?”
But Sinclair has already started to answer, his words slow, tired, and measured, dribbling out from between his lips like frozen slush. “There aren’t enough people to perform routine maintenance on anything.”
Kane sits up, and notices the large welt forming on the man’s temple.
“Half of Go-Sci and Mecha are in here.”
Sinclair smiles. “Old rivalries die hard.”
“Unlike a lot of other things, nowadays.” It takes a moment, but his lips remember how to shape into a grin. Swallowing hard, he asks again, “Who got out?”
“Raven let the generator powering the fence break down,” he says, and then sighs, half in disappointment and half in admiration. It is then that Kane regards the reduction of the amount of guards manning the prison overnight from a different perspective. “I don’t know who, and I don’t wanna know who — they got Abby out before it went hot again.”
Another jolt of adrenaline pierces his heart, shocking it from a calm weary march into a raucous pounding in his chest.
“Abby?”
Nodding, Sinclair lowers his voice. “Raven made sure of it.”
Time passes like light through a warped pane of glass; imprisonment has softened some corners of his mind. He spends too much time thinking the same things over and over, turning them over like a coin in his palm. Heads, and then tails, then heads again. He can do nothing from the inside, not since Miller’s son was removed from prison duty. Heads, he considers the realities of the situation, and then tails, his anxieties grow and he is unsettled by panic and uncertainty.
And Abby…
She has been the ultimate uncertainty.
His mouth goes dry, and he licks his cracked lips. “Did — was Clarke waiting for her? Where did she go?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know it was going to happen, sir.” Sinclair shrugs, looking down at his hands, resting face-up in his lap. “I didn’t know it did happen, until I had five guards including Bellamy Blake trying to batter down the door to my quarters this morning.”
Blinking, Kane puzzles his eyebrows together.
“Bellamy was there?”
“Yeah.”
From what little information has managed to trickle through the prison bars, Bellamy was supposed to be at Pike’s right hand at all times. As a punishment or as a reward, no one is sure.
“Why were you arrested, if it was Raven?”
Sinclair’s smile reemerges, twisting into a wry smirk. “Because Pike thought I let the generator break down.”
“You didn’t correct him?”
“I should have thought of taking down the fence first.” He punctuates his response with a measured tilt of his head, then looks at Kane again, and shrugs. “Abby can help us more from the outside, with the Grounders. And that’s without figuring in… well, you know.”
Which is to say that Kane left Abigail Griffin in a precarious position when he was arrested for treason and sedition.
Fear traps his muscles. He tries to swallow it down, but his mouth fills with the bitter taste of adrenaline. Every day he has thought of her, every night as he’s desperate to sleep, and when he can, she comes to him in his dreams. In prison, it seems as if she only exists in his mind, and for that reason at least he could deceive himself of her safety.
“So everyone knows?” he asks, his voice choked.
Lips pursed, Sinclair nods sharply. “Pike made sure of it.”
“Abby is safe?”
He knows that Sinclair has no way of knowing, but still he must ask. They would know if she was dead, he thinks. Or perhaps they wouldn’t. Kane knows that they have fallen out of favor with their people, but not that far out of favor.
“We can hope,” Sinclair answers. A soft breath passes between his lips, and when he speaks again, his voice is tinged with regret. For all of those who celebrate the end of the old Ark regime, there are those who are just as wary of the new political instability that this era of hard landings and bloody beginnings has embroiled them in. Especially as when there can be as so many as an accidental death a day. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what their plan was.”
“That’s probably for the best,” he concedes.
Then he is silent, swallowed by the dark deep ocean of doubt.
Then, remembers something else, internally cursing himself for being remiss. “Sinclair, what about your wife? Did Pike—”
“They questioned her, but that’s it.” Eyes laughing, he laces his fingers together. “She’s more than capable of making an interrogator regret hauling her in.”
Despite himself, Kane laughs.
“It was petty theft, wasn’t it?”
Sinclair folds his legs under him, then unfolds them, crossing his legs at the ankle in quest of a comfortable position. He looks at Kane fully, his uneven pupils catching in the light. “Well… a bit more complicated than that. She wrote a computer virus during the famine of thirty-eight that allocated full rations to Factory Station, instead of starvation rations.”
Squinting, Kane tries to decide how much Sinclair is looking at him or merely in his direction.
“So that’s how she wound up in computer security?”
“She was more of an asset alive… and it was Diana Sydney who was Chancellor when she turned eighteen,” he says, leaning his head back against the wall and closing his eyes. “I just wanted to know how she did it. I didn’t notice the discrepancy for three months.”
Blood trickles down from Sinclair’s hairline to the point of his cheekbone, where it is diverted to his jaw.
“So the delinquents will inherit the Earth?” Kane jokes, as sincerely as he is able.
Slitting his eyes open, Sinclair casts his gaze back in Kane’s direction. “Well, Abby is a lawbreaker in her own right.”
Both men startle when the cell door creaks back open, the hinges it hangs on protesting loudly as it's pushed past its breadth and bangs against the bars. The occupants, both Grounder and Arker alike, of the cell move as if burned, skittering to press themselves against the walls.
One of Pike’s guards points his baton into cell, and Kane knows.
“Take him.”
He staggers to his feet before the guards can rip him off the floor. For the first time, he feels a sense of relief for what is to come.
It starts five months before Abby escapes Arkadia in the middle of the night, as the last glimmers of sundown hover over the horizon, the sun scattering deep pinks and blazing reds through the startled sky. A whistle blows, and shifts end, hundreds of people pouring out of ramshackle lean-tos and canvas tents, and Chancellor Pike takes his opportunity.
The three hundred deaths, the destruction of Indra’s army, weighs heavily on some.
But most see it as a victory, and the promise of more attacks against the Grounders as a debt soon to be collected — a culmination of a century of food insecurity and the crumbling Ark coming to a head as the Sky People clamor through blood for any semblance of an unthreatened existence.
Kane ends his shift on the construction crew, his day having been spent building housing for Farm Station refugees out of corrugated metal and scrap. It’s unforgiving work; he stumbles towards the shambling hulk of Mecha Station covered in sweat, his shirt lacquered to his torso and arms, and seriously contemplating asking Abby if she would be willing to give him a haircut.
Instead, he finds himself packed into the middle of a crowd, unable to move forwards or backwards as Pike climbs to steps to an ad hoc stage. He extends his arms in greeting, his mouth forming words that Kane cannot hear. It takes nearly a minute for the crowd to quiet.
Dread pools in his stomach, and the warmth from a day’s labor turns to a cold unease.
“Under the laws of the Exodus Charter, Article Eight, Section Three, I hereby declare emergency powers as enumerated by the holdings clause,” Pike shouts, pounding his fist to his heart. “My people, the Exodus Charter was written to be rewritten to meet our needs when we returned to the ground. I have taken the burden upon myself to see to our needs.”
The coldness climbs up from his stomach to his throat when Pike’s words are met with cheers, and he looks around him for signs of disagreement on the faces around him. He finds none, until he sees Octavia a hundred yards away, her knuckles white around the hilt of her sword.
Godammit.
The disgust is written plainly on her face, and he pushes through the people around him to get to her before she has the chance to voice her feelings.
“Today, we will shut the gates for the last time. Tomorrow, we will begin the construction of a new security tunnel as the first of new security measures. And when that is completed, we will begin to take what is ours — the ground. For ourselves and our prosperity, there are a few new measures I will need to institute,” Pike continues, voice raising to a triumphant shout, stilling Kane’s feet. “For too long, the laws and rules of our government have not been respected. We have outgrown a system that considers some the first among equals.”
More cheers, and applause, tools lifted into the air by their owners. Ducking his head, Kane slides through people as they were water as Hannah Green hands Pike a tablet.
“To meet the new needs of our community, we have instituted a new appendix of criminal offenses under Penal Code One.”
A hand wraps around Kane’s wrist jerking him back.
“Run.” David Miller whispers fiercely. “They’re going to come for you tonight. Run now.”
His chin jerks downwards, a nod, and he pulls his wrist from David’s grasp. He runs, but towards Octavia, who advances towards the front of the crowd. Godammit. Above the din, or perhaps the blood pounding in his own ears, he can barely hear the crimes he’s certain he will be accused of in a few short hours.
Sedition. Those suspected of sedition may be arrested, and held indefinitely without trial. Collusion with a Grounder. Those suspected of collusion with a Grounder may be arrested, and held indefinitely without trial.
She yells when he grabs her waist, hauling her back. The inertia lifts her off her feet, and she howls, grabbing her knife.
“Octavia — Octavia, you have to leave. Now.”
“I won’t leave Lincoln,” she hisses, kicking his shin.
“I will look out for Lincoln, but you need to leave.”
She may be smaller than him, but a girl who lived under the floor for sixteen years is one who no longer lies in wait. Fighting him the whole way as he drags her in through the belly of Mecha Station, her elbows leave bruises on his arms and chest and chin. Hissing as one of her blows lands on his instep, he drops her.
“I need you to warn Indra,” he mutters into her ear, his hand on her shoulder. “Because I am sure that Pike’s next step is to raise an army.”
“You think?”
Her expression is surly, shoulders slumped forward, but she lets him push her towards the tunnel she escaped through on the morning of Pike’s slaughter of the Trikru forces. Furrowing his brow, he leads her through the curtain, looking behind them. Kane swallows hard, then places his hands on her shoulders, forcing her look at him.
“I will do my best, to protect Lincoln,” he swears. “But I need you to warn Indra. Warn Lexa. Go to Clarke. Don’t come back, they’ll arrest you. I know Lexa has sworn not to retaliate but lives can be spared.”
“What about yours?” she asks, cocking her head, her heavy braids tumbling with the movement.
He remembers sentencing her mother to death.
He will protect her children now. Or at least the one that will let him.
“Don’t worry about me. I can do more from in here than out there,” he assures her. “You’re a Grounder.”
“Damn straight I am.”
A wobbly grin captures the corners of her mouth.
Squeezing her shoulders, he nods. Then, acting entirely on impulse, leans forward to brush his lips against her forehead, not sparing her a glance as he lets go of her to heave the portion of loose covering from the wall. She climbs inside, the soles of her boots making barely a sound on vent. She turns to him one last time, extending a hand.
Deeply unsure of herself, she folds her fingers around his.
“May we meet again,” she mumbles.
Outside in the corridor, he hears heavy steps pound down the hallway. Pulling his hand from hers, he wordlessly indicates for her to go. Breathing harshly through his nose, he replaces the walling, and waits for a break in the home-going crowds before slipping back into the hallway, making for his quarters.
He won’t run.
Not while there are people he can still protect inside these walls.
He shoves the door to his quarters open, cursing loudly when he finds someone inside. “What the — Abby!”
She stops, mid-pace, and rushes to him until they are standing with their toes nearly touching. Her hands land on his chest, then his biceps, then his forearms. “Marcus, you need to run.”
“So I’ve heard.”
For all that he struggles to bring a small smile to his face, he cannot coax one from her. Bottom lip quivering, she looks down at where her hands rest on his arms. Her careful clinician’s fingers draw up his sleeve, revealing the brand of the coalition.
“This is my fault,” she murmurs. “Marcus, if I hadn’t—”
“Then it would be you they’d be coming to arrest tonight,” he says, smile unwavering. “Besides, I’m sure you’ll find a way to get yourself in trouble somehow, Abby. You always do.”
“That sounds almost like a compliment.”
Her sharp gaze fixes on his face. Taking her fingers off his arm, he lifts her knuckles to his mouth, kissing them. “Maybe it is.”
The woman in red calls her back to the City of Light as news of Abby’s disappearance spreads through the camp. While Raven has fought the call these past few weeks, on this morning she goes willingly, falling to her knees in workshop. Tendrils of light bathe her mind in a warm glow, washing away her pains and her fears until only calm remains.
“Why did you help her escape?”
Raven shrugs. “Sorry, Red. Abby’s a friend. And she wanted out.”
“That wasn’t a part of the plan.” Jaha appears at Red’s side, and Raven notes that she has found herself in an isosceles triangle of disapproval in a great marbled hall she has been in before. They are alone, except for the column of blazing light in the center of the hall.
Besides Red and Jaha and the Grounder, Raven has been here in the City of Light longer than any of the former Chancellor’s converts. And she has more than them left to lose.
“Abby can’t be controlled, Jaha. She makes her own decisions, and goes where she wants to go.”
Red lifts a single manicured eyebrow. “With your help.”
“She’s my friend.” Planting her hands on her hips, she dares the lady in red or Jaha to defy her. “When you brought me here, you said it was to end my pain and suffering. You never said I had to betray a friend.”
“We have much work to do, Raven,” Jaha says.
She curls her lip. “Do it yourself.”
The tendrils corded around her brain loosen, and then dissolve entirely. Shaking her head, Raven opens her eyes, the last vestiges of the City of Light burning into her irises. She sees Jaha and the lady approaching the column of light, stepping through it to reveal a baby’s cradle.
“Our child, Thelonius,” the lady in red whispers, placing a still hand on Jaha’s back.
Then the city leaves her.
“Where is she?”
It’s the eighth or ninth time Pike has asked him, Bellamy wonders how many more times he’ll ask before figuring out that even if Kane knows where Clarke has arranged for Abby to be hidden, he’d rather be floated than give up either of the Griffin women. Tightening his hands around his gun instead of cringing, Bellamy reflects on how hard it is to lose Kane’s loyalty, once it is won.
Kane stares straight ahead, past Pike sitting opposite him at the interrogation table, past Bellamy, standing behind Pike. “I told you, I don’t know.”
“We were friends once, Marcus.” Pike takes a long look at Kane, and Bellamy wonders if they see the same thing. The man in shackles at the interrogation is haggard, face an unhealthy pallor, eyes sunken into his face. His hair is greasy, and uncombed, his beard peppered with more grey than it was six months ago. His eyes take on a desperate sheen, despite his best attempts at a calm demeanor.
“And if I remember correctly,” Pike continues, looking at Kane like he was a puzzle to solve, “you and Abby were adversaries. What happened?”
A dim haze of life heightens Kane's features, and his eyes move to Pike’s face. Placing his cuffed hands on the table, he curls his fingers towards each other in arches, his fingernails meeting.
“Fate threw our lots in together.”
That’s one way to put it, Bellamy thinks.
“After you killed her husband,” Pike responds, shaking his head. “God, what would Jake think if he could see you two now?”
The lines on Kane’s throat move, and tighten. Genuine emotion erupts on his face, and he presses the pads of his fingers together, pushing and pushing until his nail beds turn white. “We tried to keep everyone alive.”
Pike’s iron-faced expression is wrought with revulsion.
“Including the Grounders.”
Shoulders hunched, Kane glares up at Pike. “Everyone.”
“At the expense of our people,” he spits out every word through his teeth, and then stands.
Nerves a jaunty tangle, Bellamy shifts his weight between his feet. Absent any mindful direction at all, his finger slides towards the trigger of his gun when Pike rounds the table to shove Kane down against the table, his mouth to his ear.
“Where is Abby? I know you arranged for her to escape. Where did she escape to? The Grounder capital?”
Flattening his cheek to the metal table, Kane answers. “That’s not where she is.”
Bellamy is almost certain that’s where she is.
“Where is she?” Pike demands, for either the ninth or tenth time, and then straightens, giving Kane one last shove. Bellamy is brought out of his thoughts when Kane steps up to him, hand out. “Give me your baton. Shock lashes. Ten of them, for obstruction of justice. We need to find Abby Griffin before she can give the Grounders intel on how to get into Arkadia.”
The expression on Kane’s face is inscrutable.
Bracing his gun against his armored vest, Bellamy reaches for the baton at his hip, turns off the safety, and places it in Pike’s hand. It feels as if someone else is performing the action, or if his body was merely a marionette puppet, his limbs being tugged and pulled at by invisible strings guided by the daily surveillance reports of Grounder movement beyond the tree line.
Denby and Costa haul Kane to his feet.
“They will kill us all, Marcus,” Pike says, holding up the electrified baton.
Bellamy doesn’t know what Pike expects — his own mother bore a second child under the penalty of death, because she refused to terminate the life inside of her. And then she protected that life through any means necessary, until her death was the price for Octavia’s survival. No cost was too high. He doesn’t know what Pike expects from Kane, or what he expected from Abby.
Kane’s smile is an ironic, somber thing.
“No, Charles. You will.”
He’s instructed to brace his hands on the table. The first lash makes him grunt, the second cry out. The third, he makes no sound at all. Bellamy lowers his gun, attempting to make himself look Kane in the eye.
He can’t.
But he imagines Kane’s face cannot be too unlike it was the morning he slipped a scrap of paper, a message from Raven, in with his breakfast. A message that contained only two words, a message he was to deliver under threat of injurious consequence from Raven should it fail to make it to its intended recipient.
Abby’s pregnant.
Nyko gets her to TonDC shortly after sunrise. The village is still half in ruins, but only half. New structures have been built, debris from the bombing has been cleared. And in the streets are soldiers. Not readying to march off to war like they were the last time she came to the village, but ready. And waiting. Not as nervous as they might have been months ago, not since Trikru routed Pike’s shambling army at their first attempting at claiming a Grounder village, but still on guard.
But Abby thinks that might just be the way of life on the ground.
Nyko and the rest of the party who helped her escape — most of whom she remembers as former patients — lead her through the sleepy village to a structure that she remembers as the last place that Lexa welcomed them all for the first treaty.
How long ago it all seems.
Nodding, Nyko gestures for her to walk through the door first. Stepping carefully, Abby enters the hall, a hand resting on the curve of her belly. A blur of blonde hair and a pair of leather-clad arms around her neck greet her. Unbalanced, Abby staggers a few steps, and wraps her arms around Clarke to steady herself.
“Mom,” Clarke gasps, burying her face in her neck. “You’re okay!”
Unbidden tears welling in her eyes, Abby pets her daughter’s hair, her fingers tangling in dead and knotted ends. “Hi, sweetheart.”
The child within her stirs, after being lulled into stillness by the long walk from Arkadia to TonDC. Abby feels a heel thump against her stomach, a common event. But Clarke, still pressed snugly against her, startles.
“Oh my god,” she says, and then grins wondrously. “Hi.”
Wiping her tears with one hand, Abby takes Clarke’s in the other, placing it against where baby is making their presence known.
“Abby.”
Her eyes are drawn over Clarke’s shoulder, to where Lexa is standing in the corner. Unobtrusive, face unexpressive, but still regal. Her hand rests on the pommel of her sword.
“Commander.”
Clarke looks back to Lexa, and Abby watches the two young women reach silent agreement; she does not try to decipher on what it is they have reached agreement. Looking down at the small round of her stomach, arching out from under her loose sweater, Abby strokes her thumb over the back of Clarke’s hand.
“We have to go,” Clarke says.
Lexa nods, walking forward. “We need to leave for Polis, should your leader send people after you. My personal guard will remain to defend TonDC. They have instructions to take prisoners alive, if they are able.”
Clarke laces their fingers together, and doesn’t let go until they reach Lexa’s Citadel.