Destructive
A/N: Spoilers for 4x02 and eventually a bit AU.
The Clarkes have a certain… affinity, with fire.
It begins with Amanda, brainwashed and striking matches, playing a game to see the stroke of the match against the raspy paper. Testing how short of a stroke she needs, how many times.
Actually, no.
0o0o0o0
It begins with David, who is from age nine is permitted to use the matches sometimes to light a fire or candle when the power's out. There's something illicit about it, even when he's allowed, and sometimes when he's the only one he'll let the flame eat the little stick of wood, watch it char and weaken.
Later, he'll run his fingers through the flames, daring them to burn him.
He grows up fine. Good grades are his, he's smart and goes off to a good school. Degree, degree, wife and child – he's doing just fine.
Later still he'll try to teach Amanda forgiveness, quoting trite sayings at her in the hope that they'll help her stay good. Only he has his doubts; he is after all dallying with Conrad Grayson's wife. It's stupid of him, he knows, and sometimes he wonders if there's an ulterior motive. He is not so naïve to assume that the business is running fine: he knows enough about big business to know that there are shady dealings somewhere. He just doesn't know where or whom, and investigating is the sort of thing that could put him in trouble. Still, he continues with Victoria and discards the fact that Amanda dislikes her.
In the end he winds up in a jail cell and Amanda is taken away, and one of his last outside memories is Victoria holding their child in her arms.
He comes to hate fire, hate the way it can start so easily and rage out of control.
The cell is ice, cold and grey and he has few allies. He's sure the guards are corrupt, paranoia creeps in over the weeks and clings tight. If he makes a friend, he's sure they will meet a "tragic end", and he doesn't want to bring that on another family.
Fire is sort of his end, too: six weeks away from Amanda's eighteenth birthday and he tries to repress the hope that she'll come to see him. Then there's a visitor and sharp coldhot silver and warm blood spills from his abdomen, and absurdly he thinks fire should be hotter, his blood warmer.
(That's the thing about blood, he thinks nonsensically, it should seem warm to reflect human temperature)
So the blood keeps on running and a guard comes to him, he prepares to die and thinks of Amanda –
Only he doesn't die, the blackness he expects never comes. Or it does, but it lifts and he's in the infirmary with stitches holding him together and an IV running blood into his body.
And so it goes that he thanks them upon discharge, vanishes into the night and plans to find Amanda.
He's learned his lesson though, he won't toy with fire again.
0o0o0o0
Amanda likes matches.
She's in another foster house (she refuses to call it a home. Home is what you have when you're glad to go there) and the latest foster parent is mean.
So when she leaves for a while, directing the older kids to look after the younger, Amanda sneaks a pack of matches from the kitchen and admires them. They look a little like toys, which she's no longer allowed. Or maybe she is, but toys are precious among foster kids. They inspire fights and sulks and tantrums.
It's one of the things that teaches Amanda to not get too close to anyone. If she makes a friend, they can be taken away easy as blinking.
Sometimes she stays awake at night and imagines things going up in flames. The dark-haired woman's house burning is a favourite image.
Later she begins to use the matches, slipping one from the pack and striking ineffectually at the pack. It's the wrong side, she finds out, and jumps in surprise when the flame leaps to the red part. It's thrilling though, and she runs cold water over the match, hides it under a heavy rock. Sometimes when she looks at the rock she feels that the secret is visible, that anyone can see the match.
It doesn't matter though, she's shifted to a new place a few weeks later.
A foster house goes up in smoke and becomes ash, charcoal, and her prospective adoptive parents back out immediately. She listens at the door and remembers that her father did bad things, deduces that they expect the same of her.
It wasn't her that ruined the house, but that's okay because it was a foster house, not a home, and the end result is still the same: she and Eli are separated, only this time it's an endless sort of separation and juvenile facility is another way of saying prison.
Perversely there's a tiny ember of satisfaction. She's done things she shouldn't too, and now she has something in common with her father.
There are no matches in juvie. It's cold and dull and she misses the days of striking matches, hearing the rasp and watching the flame tremble on the end of the stick, of having a minute glow of warmth. Instead, there are cold functional heaters, impersonal and unbeautiful in their uniformity. Winter is when she really misses the fire: you can't toast marshmallows on a piece of metal, and you can't pretend to be camping.
She bets the fire is going perfectly at the dark-haired woman's house.
She colours her hair black and likes the way it looks sooty, trades a pair of shoes for another bottle of black colour.
And later still, Nolan Ross is there, blond and friendly and not entirely unwelcome. He is patient with her, doesn't try to parent when she stumbles in the door drunk or high, and he doesn't give up on her. He also doesn't give up on her father and trying to get her to believe that David was innocent, that there are journals she can read and eventually she caves.
The journals remind her of Christmas cards and just-because notes and packed lunches. Instead of crying she reads fervently, burning to know what her father had to say.
Later, even later she decides that there are guilty people who need to pay.
The harsh dye is stripped from her hair and replaced with a softer blonde. She looks in the mirror and practices introducing herself.
I'm Emily Thorne.
0o0o0o0
Charlotte practices a different fire.
It's the strong liquor scorching her throat, warming her veins, easing her blood. Times like these are the ones where she feels she is in a crucible of her own making, burning down the façade and the pretense and stripping away the Grayson name until all that's left is just a girl. She likes this feeling, of putting aside her surname and boxing up school and friends and people, and just being her. Of course, her mother would disapprove of just Charlotte, and her father would be bewildered, understanding, but it's there for her. It's why she sneaks a bottle into her room, takes shots at random or drinks deep after a tiring day of being a Grayson.
When the bottle's dry, she replaces it.
And so it goes. Daniel falls in love with Emily, with her girl-next-door charm, and Charlotte too is charmed. She finds the woman fascinating, a woman who doesn't know the Hamptons and every little detail therein. The liquor is pushed aside in favour of curiosity, and when curiosity has run its course, mimicry. It's not much, but she finds herself trying to pick a similar dress to Emily, thinks about travel before college, wonders how she'd look as a blonde.
She rejects this last one. There aren't blonde Graysons after all.
Only it doesn't matter. She isn't quite a Grayson, it turns out, despite the name and the house and the inheritance she's due in a few years. She's a Clarke, and somewhere deep in her bones she wonders if her father was innocent.
This, she doesn't dwell upon. It won't bring him back, the case was closed, and anyway, Amanda is dead now. It is anger now that warms her blood, anger at being fathered by someone she never knew, and the lies and the cover-up, at her sister for leaving her.
The fire is dialled down. She has a nephew to think about and a new sister-in-law and friends who still covet her presence in their lives.
Later, much later when she feels older than she is, she learns her sister isn't as dead as society thinks. The fire flares back up, blazing stronger than ever. It makes her bold, it makes her reckless and if she's wearing a dress that could be seen red in the right light, well that's just coincidence.
Matches, so inelegant. She has no time to find matches, no energy to waste time on striking a match just so, and anyway it would be evidence. These things can be traced, and her hands tremble as she allows the fire to begin, sparks flying in a harsh parody of fireworks.
The fury hums through her veins as she bends down, bids her sister goodbye – she half expects the woman to leap at her, ready to fight – but nothing happens, and she leaves purposelessly. Nowhere to go, no family awaiting her; perhaps this is how Amanda Clarke felt all those years.
People around her snap photos and take video and she wonders why she doesn't feel triumph at beating Amanda at her own vicious game. She feels nothing, the fire is gone and she wonders where it went.
And soon enough Amanda is pulled from the flames, alive, and now she's put herself on the line for nothing.
0o0o0o0
She's Amanda, or she's Emily, one is dead and one is living, barely. Out of the hospital she sips water in an effort to repress her cough – Nolan is nagging her enough already – and is furious that Charlotte outwit her so easily. She had hoped that the girl would avoid the path of revenge, but then, she hasn't set the best example. Actually, Charlotte has never had the best example when it comes to morality, and it's kind of a wonder that she remained so good for so long.
She decides she's Emily and sticks with it, refuses to unveil herself as the real Amanda Clarke. Society, for the most part, thinks Amanda is dead, and she's amazed that it's stayed quiet for so long. There have been no interviews, no legal enforcers banging the door down.
Jack's friend is cute, and sweet, but she's dedicated years to revenge and he's dedicated to the law. Some of her actions have been on the grey side of legal, if not outright illegal; there would be too much of that baggage. Jack himself is moving on, it's sort of just her and Nolan. Nolan, who would have her wear the mantle of Amanda Clarke, and leave revenge behind – maybe she's already grown out of the Hamptons.
And when Victoria wields a gun at her, threatens suffering and pain and misery, she decides to find somewhere else to live. Somehow she has reached the point where she will avenge on the behalf of others, because it is automatic to her – as much as breathing. Seeing a wrong committed urges her to right it, to do right by the wronged party and it is not her role. It is not for her to avenge someone she barely knows. She will not be pushed out of the Hamptons, but she will not stay for an endless loop of retribution. She achieved her goal; she got what she wanted.
Besides, she considers it a final act of revenge to deny Victoria her revenge.
0o0o0o0
No-one ever said she would go quietly.
So she buys gasoline (oh the irony) and cans of hairspray. If it's flammable, she buys it, and she has mastered the art of scattering her purchases across a million places and paying with cash. Matches, for old times' sake, and an alibi is easy enough for her revenge-trained mind.
The old beach house is empty, but still hers. Just to be sure, she double-checks, and she's correct: no other people present, just the filmy curtains and her last Hamptons plans. The few who matter know she's going, but they don't know where. Nolan has agreed not to find her, convinced once she reminded him of her vengeance-free life plans. He's too much of a revenger, like her. For all that he argued against her revenge plans he became entangled in them, they became a part of him and she will always associate him with revenge.
And she carves a line through the houses, bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms, of flammables. The line goes unbroken and there's a new irony, the one that connects the Graysons and the Clarkes. A new connection is forged right now and she drops a match, flees into the ocean where a boat awaits her.
Nolan's last piece of his promise to David Clarke is fulfilled as he whisks her away on the ocean, bringing her to another city where she'll take transport elsewhere. Plane or bus or train, he doesn't know, and he doesn't ask.
The flames light the night, reflect off the ocean as she silently practices her new identity.
As the ocean churns below her and the flames level her last identities to the ground, she feels like a phoenix.