A/N: Warning for some self-harm
Clarke starts with the soles of her feet.
It's not by choice. It's not like she wakes up and thinks that bleeding herself, that slowly working her way to the death by a thousand cuts is a good idea and she should totally start with her feet, with the soles, the tender delicate flesh that you never think of. It is that, she knows. The soles are the souls and without them you're stuck, motionless, going nowhere fast and nowhere slow.
And not going isn't the same as not staying because staying is a choice, even if it isn't the one she made.
The first one, the first cut, is an accident. She's just finished washing off in a stream, washing as best she can. It's taken less than a week of walking for the dirt.. The Earth… to rise up around her and cover her. It rains the fourth night and her shelter, such as it was kept her dry but the mud oozed in over night and now it's all become something of a second skin, a layer of hardened dust and dirt and whatever. Sometimes she thinks about letting it go, about letting it just sink and soak into her, burying her even as she walks.
Sometimes. But not always because those are the thoughts of someone who wants to die and that's not Clarke. Not yet. She doesn't have the first inkling of how to live anymore but that doesn't mean she wants to stop doing it. So she keeps walking and she keeps washing and she keeps hoping that one or the other will fix whatever is broken or at least show her how before…
She just keeps walking.
Sometimes she thinks about the dirt and sometime she thinks about her friends, her mother, her people. Sometimes she thinks about which way she's going and what she might find. A trading outpost or a Grounder village.
Polis is out there. Somewhere. And sometimes she thinks of it and that makes her think of Lexa and then she doesn't think of that anymore.
Sometimes, when it's night or in the early light of day or when it rains or when the sun beats down on her so savagely she's grateful for that extra layer of skin, sometimes she thinks of… other…things… things she knows she's better off not thinking of which, she supposes is exactly why she does.
She thinks of dying gasps she never heard. Of friends who will never look at her again because all they'll see in her eyes and her face and the haunted empty of her smile is them. The dead family. Dead friends. Those she couldn't save and those she killed in the trying. Dead friends and dead families and dead children and sometimes Clarke thinks of walking back to Mount Weather and sitting on level five and never moving again because somehow looking at the dead might hurt less than not looking at the living.
So she walks and she thinks until she can't and then she washes to try and remind herself she's human - of one kind or another - and that's what it happens, the first one. As she's climbing out of the stream, in that moment - the only one she has - when she feels new and alive and forgets for just a moment why she's out here.
She figures, later, that's why it happened then. That's why the Earth, so much of it scorched by her and hers, reached up and reminded her.
Or maybe, she thinks, that's just what she wants it to mean.
The stream bed is rocks and most of them are big. Big enough and smooth enough in spots that she can step on them, climb them, navigate her way back to solid dry ground. Most of them are like that but not all and it's not one of the big ones that does it. It's a small one. A jagged little number hidden between, jutting out of a crack, the tip of it covered in just enough moss to blend in, so she doesn't see it until it slices through her skin.
It's not a bad cut, not at all. She's had worse, some even before she came to the ground. It's the shock, mostly, the sudden stab and the first blush of pain as her skin splits and she yells out, yanking her foot from the ground and hopping the last few steps to the dirt and grass.
It's the yell that really does it, that pisses her off and hurts more than the thing on her foot that she refuses to call a wound. She's better than that. Stronger and tougher. But being on the ground, has taught her that stronger and tougher and braver and wiser at all relative concepts here.
On the Ark it was easy, it was clear. Strong and tough were easily and obviously defined there. If you were alive, you were both.
If you weren't…
Clarke pulls her foot towards her and tries not to think of the Ark. She tries not to think of how the things she hated, the black and whites of rights and wrongs, the things that got too many people floated - and not just her father but yeah, him too - are the same things she misses now.
The ground is different. Down here there are gradations of everything, of right and wrong and pain and sorrow and loss. The Ark had rules and society and politics and some of it, she swore, was nothing more than the same shit that got them all killed almost a hundred years ago just gussied up as necessary evils if they wanted to survive.
There is nothing gussied up on the ground, there was no making the bad seem better. They'd had necessary evils on the Ark, but the ground is necessary evils. And every day you spend above ground you give into them a little.
Or soon, you find that you're not above ground anymore.
The ground is like the stream bed. It brought them big rocks, smooth and shiny. It brought them space and freedom and more air than they will ever need. And it brought them the little ones. The tiny jagged points hiding beneath it all. The moments and decisions that turned them into an entire population of Jahas, of 'no good guys', of making one bad choice after another because they're all a step up from the worse choice.
Until the worse choice is all you have left.
Clarke winces as she looks to her to her foot, bending her knee and twisting so she can see the sole. She almost misses it at first, her so-called wound, it's that tiny and that insignificant. It's only when she twists just right, when the skin on the bottom of her foot fold and wrinkles in exactly the right spot, that she sees it, that it just… appears.
It was always there, she knows that. It was there even when she didn't - or couldn't - see it and she's sure of that because she felt it cut and there's a tiny fragment of rock left behind, wedged in the folds of her skin, as if the Earth knew she'd need the evidence. But it's like so much else down here. Hidden. Buried. It's there if you know where to look but you almost never do and so you never see it coming, even when you know you should have, when it was right there the whole fucking time.
And that's the ground, too. Reminding you of things you're trying to forget through any and all means. Even a tiny little rock and a not-really-wound.
Clarke leans back against a tree, clutching her foot and trying to forget, again. She thinks of her mother and her father and birthdays when she was little and she and Wells were friends. She thinks of kissing Finn - the only kisses she lets herself think of because all her kisses on the ground have hurt, in the end, but at least his betrayal was for her. She thinks of those first days, of watching Octavia and Jasper and Monty revel in the new world and of the unmitigated and unpolluted joy of seeing her mother, alive, again.
And she thinks of the mountain. Of the art and the music and the laughter. Of the white walls without so much as a flake of dirt or mud and all the things they clung to, the things they held to from who they'd been before the bombs. All that things that had reminded her, for a moment or two (or more, when she'd let it) that it - life - wasn't just about what you could endure on the way to death, not even on the ground.
She thinks of all that and tries not to think of the monsters that perverted it and ruined it and made all the clean and beautiful into something worse than the bombs.
Or the monster who killed them all.
And that's the one thing Clarke misses most from the Ark, from before her father died and everything changed. She misses a time when she wasn't so fucking maudlin, so dramatic, and so 'I bear it so they don't have to' because that is just so much bullshit.
She bears it because she did it and everything else is some kind of Christ complex she doesn't have the time, energy, or need to deal with anymore.
Living is too much fucking work as it is.
So that's what she gets back to. Living. Twisting and turning and checking her foot from every angle, the doctor in her blood kicking in. It's a clean cut. Straight and true and not very deep and with some care, just a little, it won't amount to anything and she'll like forget it's even there within a day. That, she knows, is a luxury the ground doesn't usually afford.
Standing and dressing and even walking aren't issues until she steps just right - forgetting it's there already - and the pain shoots through her sole and into her heel. She doesn't cry out this time, but she does slump against the tree, lifting her foot off the ground until the pain passes, which it does quickly - another rarity - and she's able to drop her foot.
She takes one experimental step without difficulty. And then another. And then another and another and another and then there's that stab again, unexpected and quick, less stab and more cut, like paper slicing against her skin. She winces but it's nothing really, just a little pain and soon she'll be used to it, soon she won't even feel it, soon it won't slow her down and it will be just a little something she has to endure.
Endurance.
One more necessary evil.
Clarke learned that one long before the ground.
If the first is an accident - or the Earth, the ground, toying with her and take your pick on that, really - then the second and third are experiments. Tests. She's a scientist of a sort, after all.
Can't be sure of anything without tests.
Clarke walks on the first cut for four or five hours and, for most of that time she doesn't even feel it. She has to step in just the right way, twist her foot at exactly the right angle and then she notices it, then she feels that quick, sharp sting riding along the sole of her foot, back to her heel and up to her toes. The first three times she does it are accidents, missteps caused by uneven ground or branches or rocks or her not paying attention because she's thinking again.
Not everyone, not you
If you need forgiveness, I'll give that to you
What did you do?
The first three times are accidents but the fourth, she does on purpose. The same with the fifth and sixth, the ones right before nightfall as she's prepping her camp. She tries to tell herself she does it to feel something, something more than the sun and the rain and the dirt and the empty feeling gnawing at her stomach from lack of food and just lack.
She never was a very good liar.
Those last couple, they're the ones that linger and stay with her. They're the ones she can still feel as she tries to fall asleep listening to the noises she doesn't recognize in the night.
On the Ark, she knew all the noises by heart. Air compressors and hydraulic pumps and the faint rushing thrum thrum of the thrusters that kept them in orbit.
"You can't really hear them," her father told her. "None of us can. They don't make any sound in space and we're too far removed from them, there's too many decks and too much metal in the way for us to hear them in here."
Clarke nodded and watched him, the way she always had, like he was the sun and it hurt her eyes to look but she just couldn't stop. He ran his hand along the nearest wall, tracing the outline of a thin dent in the bulkhead that had been there as long as she could remember.
"I hear them too," he whispered and then her mother was there ushering him off to talk about something supposedly too grown up for Clarke's ears.
She was sixteen and soon he'd be dead and she'd be headed for the ground and she still hears thrusters at night even over the sounds of the woods.
That night she dreams of Finn which doesn't surprise her. The dead walk through her dreams every night, the ones she'd shared goodbyes with and the ones she didn't. She dreams of Ark Finn, who she never knew and his spacewalk that he never too. In her dream, he peels off the suit and the alarms sound and the he's hustling Raven through corridor after corridor with security always just one hallway back.
Raven runs and Clarke watches her legs as the move. So fluid, so smooth, so quick. She runs and Finn hisses directions at her through clenched teeth as they navigate the Ark. Right here. Left up ahead. Another right and another. Left at the end of the hall.
Clarke knows where they're going even before they end up at her door and she's waiting to usher them in. When security arrives they're sitting there - the three of them - around her tiny table, chatting like the oldest friends in the universe and she alibis them both. Finn smiles gratefully and Raven stares at her across the table, her eyes flicking back and forth between Clarke and her boyfriend and Clarke has to move, has to leave, has to get away.
She winces as her foot hits the floor.
"You OK?" Finn asks and Clarke doesn't know what to say because it's a dream and she can't warn him not to go to the ground or not to search for her or to always be in love with Raven because then he won't die and her foot hurts and Raven's staring and security's coming back because there's no one else it could have been.
And she wakes. In the woods, on the ground and she doesn't sleep again that night.
When light finally comes, Clarke takes her knife from her belt and pulls off her boot. It's just an experiment, she reasons. It's just a test. She slices slowly, carefully, two cuts, on on either side of the one the rock gave her.
One for each.
It's that simple, really. One for each of them, one for each of them that she wronged, no matter what bullshit her subconscious gave her about saving them and their fates being out of her hands.
Clarke knows better.
She didn't save anyone.
She stares at her foot, at the three tiny red slivers of broken skin all lined up in a row.
One for each.
It is, she thinks, a start.