AN: I know nothing of the books that the 100 is based upon, but I had this little nugget of a piece in the back of my mind. I hope you enjoy.
Who We Must
The first time Abby saw her daughter, she was walking through the forest. The physician had been walking for days with the rest of those that survived the fall of ARC station. It had been months since they'd found the drop ship and the wreckage around it. The bodies had made them lose hope for a time, but it was Kane-infuriating, damned, blessed Kane-who first asked her why there were so many bones.
Too many, and never before had Abby been more grateful to count skulls.
Nearly two hundred, and so the dead couldn't have just been the massacred children, so they had started looking for survivors. They'd been looking for months before they'd come across Lincoln and Octavia, the first survivor and the bearer of news. A news that Clarke was alive last time the girl had seen her. Lincoln had suggested that the Mountain Men had taken their children, and the remaining parents-a scarce thirty people-had reacted violently.
There had been voices of reason-Lincoln and Kane, who hated that they saw eye to eye but had to agree-but in the end, they had agreed. Octavia's doe eyes had swayed his heart, and Abby had only to fix Kane with a look from across a campfire. It had been three days, and Lincoln cautioned that they should have run into the perimeter guards of Mount Weather, but there had been no such resistance.
None at all, really, and when Abby saw her, she thought maybe she'd fallen asleep walking. Because that had to be a dream. Clarke had never looked like that, with her hair dirty and curling, face smudged with blood and dirt. Her clothes were clinical but filthy, caked in blood and mud and something that was too dark to be dirt. Those things, Abby could have looked past. It was the rest, the other things that her mind could not reconcile. The semi-automatic slung across her shoulders. The hard line to her mouth and the way she walked out front of the rest as they came like a wave through the trees.
They did not react at first, but Lincoln had kept them well hidden, so Abby wondered if they even knew they were there. Abby watched, frozen, as another, a tall young man with broad shoulders and a matching gun, walked beside her.
"Bellamy!" Octavia shouted, and in the next moment, the girl was shooting past her and Kane and into the slack arms of the young man. He stood, shocked and wide-eyed a moment before crushing her to his chest. A mousy boy latched onto the pair of them, and Abby was shocked when both a small and big hand clutched him a moment before the girl latched onto him.
"Monty?" Ah Lam Green had said, voice quiet and unsure, but her husband had repeated their son's name with more strength. In a moment, a young man was wrapped between them and more parents were surging forward, trying to find their children amongst those that survived. Clarke was gone then, pushed to the back of their group, and Abby stood there, still and staring at the memory of the image of a woman that she could no longer recognize.
"You saw her?" Kane asked beside her, and Abby nodded.
"That's Clarke," Abby murmured. "But it's not Clarke."
"Go find your daughter, Abby," Kane urged, and pushed her forward. It was all the catalyst that Abby needed, and in a moment, she was wading through those trying to find their children, those mourning the news of their death, and those who had given up trying to find their parents. When she finally found her, Clarke was standing some ten paces off with that young man, and both of them looked on like happy parents, proud and tired and so very relieved at having someone else babysit for a time. It was a look that no child should bare.
"Clarke?" Abby called, and she could see her shoulders tense. She did not turn toward Abby, but instead, she looked up at the young man, whose eyes found Abby's hard and unyielding. Fierce and protecting. He stepped in front of her in a gesture that was blatant and unconfuseable. "Clarke?" Abby called again.
"Princess?" the young man asked, and glanced over his shoulder as Clarke-Clarke, who could be more beautiful?-stepped around her.
"Mom?" Clarke asked, as if she didn't believe what was in front of her. "Bellamy, is that my mother?"
"Yeah, Princess, that's your mom," Bellamy confirmed, and that was all it took for that hard Clarke, the one that Abby could not recognize, to dissolve and be replaced with her daughter, running at her and burring herself into her chest.
"Shh...it's ok. It's ok." Abby heard the words, but her own mouth was pressed to Clarke's forehead. Clarke's was muttering something about a drop ship, and Abby only barely recognized the strength of another pair of arms holding them upright.
-Who We Must-
"No!" Abby shouted, throwing a bloody scalpel clear across the drop ship. It clattered to the ground with a definite sound. A finalized sound. A sound that matched the look on her daughter's face.
"You don't have a say," Clarke said firmly, and in that moment, Abby was forced to recognize the woman there-the real, honest to God woman-that her daughter had become.
"I'm your mother," Abby said, but the argument was weak. "I just got you back. I'm not going to let you go off again. Kane can go. He's our leader-"
"No, mom, he's your leader," Clarke paused, as if trying to measure her next words. Abby saw the tarp they'd hung up over the door flutter and the dark head of Bellamy Blake before her daughter continued. "We...we've been down here for months. You are...you're the Arc. We're grounders now. We had to live on our own. We had to...you don't get to send me to earth and then pull the mom card."
"I'm still your mother, on earth or on the Arc."
"And I'm still the co-leader of the 100. We will not be locked up again. Just because you're here now? That doesn't mean you all get to stay if you keep trying to take over. This isn't the Arc. There is no Queen Abby and King Jaha. Not down here."
"I...I'm not trying to take over, Cl-"
"You're in my med bay, you're using my supplies, and you kicked me out days ago," Clarke interrupted. "Kane keeps trying to change our guard rotations on the wall, and he's not doing it with your people, he's doing it with ours, and frankly, what's left of the 100 are sick of it." Clarke drew a long breath, a steadying breath, and for a moment, Abby felt like the child. "You abandoned us to die." Those blue eyes locked on her. "You sent us down as your test subjects. To burn up or get radiation poisoning, and you know what? A lot of us died."
"A lot of us died on the arc-"
"One of the first was a boy named Atom," Clarke said, but the fight was gone from her voice. "He got caught in the acid fog, which if you haven't seen that yet, doesn't kill you. It just burns your skin and your eyes and your lungs. It leaves you wimpering on the ground until you get eaten by one of the animals down here." She spoke with such a steady voice that Abby wondered for a moment if she was making it up. "He asked me to kill him, and looking at him...I couldn't find a reason to make him suffer. No one could have saved him from that, and he was a good guy, Mom. You sent a good kid down here to die slowly." Those sharp blue eyes crippled her. "At least on the Arc, you died quickly or peacefully. At least you sent the criminals down for murdering, right?"
"We did what-"
"You became who you had to be to survive," Bellamy cut in. "But so did we." Abby glared at him, but Clarke sent him a grateful look, turning toward him, that god forsaken gun slung across her shoulder.
Bellamy shifted his matching weapon to the opposite shoulder as he reached out a hand and took Clarke's. They left the dorp ship like that, and for the first time in her life, Abby Griffin wondered if she had the strength to be who she must.