AN - I wanted to write, I was totally blocked on my other stuff, so I challenged myself to turn on Pandora and write based on the first song that played. Low and behold, here is "You Can't Go Home Again".
If you're reading my other stuff, Eighteen is coming soon and 101 is on an every other day schedule. Monday is my last final of the semester, and then we're in winter break for a month, so updates are going to be coming more frequently!
I really do love you all! - Brea
Minor update Dec. 14, to make the flow a little better. Also corrected fic status; "Go Home" is a completed one shot, sorry to all you followers who were mislead.
I know they say you can't go home again.
I just had to come back one last time.
I got lost in this whole world and forgot who I am.
I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
this brokenness inside me might start healing.
Out here its like I'm someone else,
I thought that maybe I could find myself.
-Miranda Lambert, The House That Built Me (assorted lines)
Phoenix was supposed to burn. That's what Sinclair said, what the Ark data had suggested. Phoenix was supposed to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere during re-entry. It's why her mother was on Mecha station during the fall.
So it was a shock to Clarke, and to the rest of the scouting team as well, when she pushed through the last of the forest to the edge of the crash site, only to come face to face with the Phoenix Station observation platform.
Actually, only half of the platform was visible from her vantage point, but later they'd found the other half about a mile away, nothing but blackened ground and melted metal between them. Clarke can see the lines on the platform where generations of Phoenix students once stood to receive their apprenticeship assignments - where she herself stood on the day she was assigned to shadow Dr. Lahiri in the hospital.
The Phoenix crash site is roughly five miles long, edge to edge. It's the largest crash site they've found yet.
It's just luck of the draw when, on the second day, she's assigned to this grid section, which just happens to contain this section of satellite.
She recognizes the walls of H-passage the second she turns around the jagged edge of broken alloy, even before she sees the large 'H' printed on the wall she falls against. It must be instinctive, because aside from that 'H' and the now-missing plaques at either end of the hallway, H-Passage is identical to every other residential passage on Phoenix.
Her feet take her to the familiar (but still identical to every other one on the station) door before she can remind herself that she's supposed to be looking for supplies.
It opens easily without electricity to control the thumb-print locks.
She walks through in a daze, hands brushing idly against the walls as she looks for anything familiar. All of the furniture in the apartment is broken, thrown around in the landing and shattered. Pieces of broken technology, shards of glass, and metal slivers are strewn about the floor, the only evidence of whatever belongings Abby had laying around the day of the crash.
Clarke stops inside her bedroom door. It's been over a year since she's seen it. God, she thinks, I was sixteen the last time I was here.
Like the rest of the apartment, the room's furnishings are trashed, but her art still lines the walls. Scraps of paper pinned against the metal mingle with the charcoal sketches she'd drawn on the surface of all four walls. The ceiling above her is supposed to be the night sky from Earth, looking through trees, though now Clarke knows that it (and the copy she'd left on the floor of her solitary cell) is lacking in comparison to the real thing.
She wonders if her mother ever sat in here after her arrest, regretting her decision to trust Jaha. Clarke can picture Abby on her bed, wracked with guilt, staring up at that charcoal covered ceiling. The image makes her feel vilified and ashamed all at once.
At some point Clarke lowered herself to the floor, though she doesn't remember it. Her mind keeps running through her last days here; hugging her father; siding with him against Abby; crying, wrapped in her mother's arms, after his arrest. She was even arrested in this room, though the memory is fuzzy and clouded by grief.
It can't be more than an hour, but Clarke is surprised when she hears her name being called from outside. She checks her father's watch - she's twenty minutes late for the prearranged check-in, which explains why they've sent someone to look for her. It's tempting, very very tempting, to remain silent here, in her old room, until whoever it is comes to find her, but the logical part of Clarke's brain kicks in after her name echos twice more down the passage.
If she doesn't answer, the one person they've sent will turn into a squad, pulling people from the other grids and probably doubling the amount of time it will take to clear the wreck sight.
The heavy steps of someone trying to make noise filter through the open doorways and Clarke calls out to their owner.
"I'm in here!"
Bellamy recognizes the art on the walls before he sees the artist on the floor. It's Clarke's style, though the images are different from the sketches he's seen her scratch in the dropship in the same way pre-war paintings of the stars are different from art by Ark artists. The drawings surrounding him are imaginations of Earth, while the work he's seen her scribble onto the corner of her maps are memories.
And among it all is Clarke, slowly pushing herself to her feet in the middle of the room, with fading tear tracks streaking her cheeks.
They don't speak. Bellamy watches Clarke, his eyes softening at the sight of her, trying to imagine the girl she'd been when she'd etched that waterfall onto the wall next to a portrait of Wells Jaha. He imagines her hair is braided, the way it hasn't been since their earliest days on the ground, and her skin is clean the way Phoenix kids were always cleaner than the rest of them, before the fall.
"Clarke…" he breathes. He's not sure what to say; as far as he knows none of the scouts have come across their old quarters in the other wrecks.
She sniffles.
"I was arrested there." She says, "Right where you're standing."
Bellamy isn't sure what to say to that, but she's got her head tilted towards the ceiling and can't see his uncertainty.
"I don't want…"
She doesn't finish, but Bellamy thinks he knows what she's saying. He nods. "I'll radio that I found you." He ducks out of the room, out of the apartment, and out of H-Passage back to the fresh air of their mountain. He gets in touch with the scout-base, a small camp in the middle of the wreckage that serves as their center-of-operations in the wreck site, to update them. "I'm going to stick around here for a while." He tells Monty on the other end. "There's a whole residential passage down here," he doesn't say which one, in case the engineer recognizes it, "it'll take us all day to catalog everything worth taking."
Monty agrees to sending the grid 6 scout to finish Bellamy's grid 7, since both seem rather barren, and they sign off. Bellamy hesitates outside H-passage, unsure about going back inside if Clarke wants to be alone. After five minutes of self debate he goes back, figuring that Clarke will tell him to get out if she wants him gone. She's that kind of blunt.
He wonders if sixteen year old Clarke, who sketched a line of cartoon mushrooms around her bedroom door, was blunt like that.
Clarke hasn't moved when Bellamy returns, though she's looking around at the walls now instead of the ceiling. Her tears have stopped, which she's grateful for, and Clarke thinks the evidence of them is mostly gone. She speaks without looking at him.
"I think I forgot who I am, Bellamy." He doesn't answer, so she continues. "It's like… like I'm lost, or like I lost myself. Does that make sense?" Her head tilts forward a little, she's squinting at a live beetle scuttling across a black and white leaf drawn in the corner.
He starts to speak and then stops, and Clarke finds herself straining to hear him continue, though her gaze remains on the bug. When he does continue, he does so haltingly, hesitating, as if trying to find the right words as he goes. "Who you are now isn't who you were then… it isn't a bad thing, Clarke. It's just… different." Clarke considers this. "We're all different on Earth than we were up there. We've seen and done things that never would have happened on the Ark. That's bound to change us."
She scoffs, pointing a finger at a self portrait on the same wall her bed (now in a thousand unrecognizable pieces across the floor) used to lay on. "That Clarke never would have done the things I've done."
Yeah, well the guy I was on Walden never would have done half the things I've done, either." He doesn't say it, but Clarke can hear the echo of a memory in her mind, Bellamy talking about his mother; she raised me to be better… I'm a monster. Her own voice answers his, so sure in it's rightness, I forgive you. By comparing them, Bellamy is trying to tell her the same thing, to give her forgiveness she doesn't feel like she deserves.
He's trying to fix the parts of her that feel broken. She thinks it's working, so she looks at him.
"When I found this place," she's waves her hand around the room, "I thought I could, I don't know, find myself or something. Who I used to be at least. But I feel… It's like I'm so different I don't recognize who that is anymore. I'm not doing a good job explaining this." When Bellamy grins at her exasperation, it reminds her of days before the Ark-fall, before the war with the Grounders, even, when all they had to worry about was keeping everyone warm and fed for another day.
"Oh, I don't know." He says, shrugging, smile still in place. "You still have the biggest room of any of us, though I don't think your dropship is half this big. You realize my whole place on Walden could have fit into this one room?"
He doesn't say it bitterly, and Clarke laughs less at the joke and more out of happiness that their class differences seem to have faded from his eyes. He`says her name seriously this time. "Who you used to be isn't important. It's who you are now that matters, and I think you're pretty great." That's a high compliment, in Bellamy speak, and now she's beaming and he's smiling right back, and the room suddenly seems ten times brighter than the sunlight streaming through the small porthole window.
"Alright," Bellamy says decisively, standing straighter, "time to get back to work. Think your mom had any good food stashed?" Clarke just rolls her eyes.