A/N: Hello! Thank you for reading my story. Please leave me a review and tell me what you think, if you can, it'd be greatly appreciated. Live long and prosper! xx
Disclaimer: I don't own the 100, sadly.
Clarke sat on her small, steel bed and processed what her mother was saying.
"I'm going to earth," she repeated, just to try out the words. "I'm going to earth."
Abby Griffin wrung her hands. "Yes. The council needs someone to test earth before they send the criminals, and they... they voted on you."
Clarke didn't look at her mother. "Because I wanted to tell people the truth, with Dad." Abby nodded. "You voted for me to go," Clarke whispered a moment later. "Didn't you."
Abby took a step forward and Clarke shifted back. "Clarke," her mother pleaded, "it's your chance at survival! There's nothing left for you here." she hesitated, looking around the grey walls on Clarke's cell, covered in charcoal drawings. "You get to live on earth!"
Clarke turned to face her mother, disgust written on her face. "You're not sending me to live," she hissed. "You're sending me to die."
Abby left, and Clarke cried.
They strapped her into a small dropship and told her to go to Mt Weather for extra supplies. Clarke's arms burned where her mother had clenched her tightly before pulling her into a hug and tranquillising her. As the ship sank towards earth, Thelonious Jaha's face appeared on a screen and Clarke spat at it.
He called her expendable and Clarke wondered if her mother had helped write the speech.
"Good luck," he said, and then dropped out. The dropship lurched and shook, and Clarke tried not to wail.
She landed with a bang and wondered if she was dead. Her arm was bleeding, and her eyesight was spotted, but she managed to stumble out of her seat.
She sat in front of the door and wondered what she had left to fear.
The communication devices had broken, and Clarke sniffled. She was now, apparently, dead to the ark and all it's inhabitants. She hand't been on earth for a day and everything had already gone wrong.
She opened the door.
Earth was every bit as beautiful as the books had said. Green vines hung down from the tall, reaching trees. Flowers grew out of moss and their tantalising aroma's were palpable even from where Clarke stood. She grinned and clutched her map tighter.
The grin turned into anger when she found out that she was on the wrong mountain. She didn't cry, because she figured she could break down when starvation wasn't quite so imminent.
She collected everything she could salvage from the dropship, and then she headed off.
She stopped at the river, because she had seen a giant eel-thing in a smaller stream and wanted to be sure she could cross.
Hiding under the cover of the trees, Clarke fought not to scream when a figure emerged from the trees near her. They carried a spear and wore a mask, and Clarke tried not to breathe. The person filled up a waterskin and then slunk away, footsteps almost completely silent.
Clarke ran back to her dropship under the cover of darkness. Her feet pounded on the earthen floor, and she didn't see the mutated skeleton until she'd tripped over it.
I'm dead, she thought. I'm so dead.
On the third week of surviving off of berries and river-water, Clarke met Anya.
"My people live in space," Clarke said carefully, eyes on the warriors behind the fierce leader, "They sent me to see if earth as survivable-" Two men grabbed her arms from behind, and Clarke thrashed.
"The earth is survivable," Any a said coldly. "But not for skypeople. This is OUR land. When are your people coming?" Clarke writhed. "I don't know!" she said, but it was only half the truth.
Anya knew it too.
Clarke spent two weeks in their prison camp. Her writs were chained to the walls beside her, and Anya's second, Indra, would stand in front of her.
"When are your people coming?" she'd ask, and for every time that Clarke said she didn't know, they lashed across her back more violently. Clarke's throat was raw from screaming for so long.
One of the more quiet warriors who frequently stood guard over her gave her extra water sometimes. She named him Ricky, in her mind, before he whispered "Lincoln."
On the fifteenth day, Anya visited. Her knife was poised over Clarke's shoulder, and Clarke didn't break eye contact.
"When are your people coming?" Anya asked, and Clarke stared at her stubbornly.
"I've told you all I know," she hissed. "If you're going to kill me, just do it."
Anya's knife dug into her shoulder and Clarke screamed.
On the sixteenth day, they dumped her in the woods, with a poultice for her wounds. Clarke wasn't sure why.
In Clarke's fifth week, she crossed the river and hiked to Mount Weather. Then she was knocked out and strung up like a doll before she even knew what was happening. The one minute, she was staring into the face of a masked man, and the next she opened her eyes and saw cages and cages. She tried to scream but found herself too exhausted. A tear dripped down her nose and she wondered if she'd died in her sleep and was now in hell. She probably deserved it.
Clarke was trapped in Mount Weather for just over a week. The woman in the cage next to her was called Echo, and she told Clarke of the people within the mountain. Clarke couldn't understand everything Echo said, but from what she could she assumed that the mountain men didn't know she was different.
They knew her blood was, though, and she was drained more often than any of the others once they figured it out. On the tenth day, Clarke fought her way out. She choked a man with her bare hands and stole his gun to shoot two others. Her fingers were red and dripping, and she wanted to save the others but there were footsteps approaching her and Clarke ran.
So, on Clarke's forty-fifth day on Earth, she met the reapers. First she fell into a tunnel filled with the dead. Then she hid in a cart and had those same bodies dumped onto her. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to make any noise. Then the cart began to move.
She ran after hearing the first screams, accompanied by the sound of flesh being torn apart and teeth gnashing together. Nobody noticed.
She jumped off a dam and almost drowned. Her shoulder and left arm were bashed open by rocks, and she almost bled out- again. Acid fog rolled in and she almost passed out from exhaustion right then and there. Clarke's last words to her mother echoed in her ears. "You're not sending me to live, you're sending me to die."
She wished she could see Wells once more, to punch him or hug him she wasn't sure.
Clarke spent the night in a buried car, drinking from the flask she found, and wondered why Wells had told his father and betrayed her own. Then she wondered how. He'd have had almost no time, between talking to Clarke and Jake being floated. Where had Abby been? Where had her mother been that day? Why had she been at the airlock already? Why had she been next to Thelonious? Like she knew? Clarke tried not to throw up and bandaged her bleeding back to distract her trembling fingers. She'd torn it open again.
You've sent me to die, just like you did him.
On Clarke's seventh week on earth, when she was learning to hunt and had moved into a bunker with pencils and blankets and clothes, she saw Lincoln again.
She jolted up from her rabbit snare, and fought back a groan when her back protested heavily.
He raised his hands peacefully. "I mean you no harm," he said, and Clarke watched him distrustfully. He fixed her snare and taught her how to perfect her spears and bows.
Clarke liked him.
In week nine, she met Nyko. He taught her, silently, how to brew different poisons and medicines. He told her it was because she had saved Lincoln's life a week before, staunching Lincoln's bleeding after a panther attack. Lincoln told her it was because Nyko was curious.
Nyko told her, on his third visit, to let him fix her back. She did. He told her he'd done a good job on it, and she laughed and it was a sad sound. But his stitches held, and the scars from his work in patching her up were neater than her own.
Next was Artigas. He was young but fierce, and Clarke knew better than most that age was just a number. He taught her how to make her steps in the woods completely silent, and Clarke thanked him by drawing his portrait. He grinned and clasped her forearm. Clarke smiled back.
Lincoln's next friend was Indra- and Clarke swore and staggered backwards when she saw her, holding her daggers in her hands warningly. Indra looked over her with disgust, before attacking her slowly. Clarke was knocked down but furiously scrambled up again. Lincoln had an excellence poker face, but she saw the guilty gleam in his eyes, so Clarke refrained from calling him some of the more colourful Trigadesleng words she had learned. Indra attacked her again and again, and Clarke realised what she was doing. Sussing her out. Training. She stopped the outraged yells and fought back without her daggers.
Lincoln told her later than Anya had agreed to leave Clarke in peace, but his people were curious. Anya wanted Clarke to stay alive until her people came, because she was a bargaining chip, so she had sent Indra to train her. Clarke didn't thank Indra for teaching her how to become a warrior, but she stopped hating her.
In her third month, Clarke walked into TonDC and traded some of her meat for a pair of new shirts. She ignored the stares, nodded at Indra, and waved at a little boy who hid behind his mother's skirts. Nobody attacked her. Clarke thought it was a success. Lincoln thought she was crazy.
By the fourth month, she knew Trigadesleng almost fluently. She knew the legends of the Maunon. She had met Heda Lexa. She had a tattoo on the inside of her wrist, a shining star, and one curling around her upper arm, the band that signified a healer.
She knew that the design carved into her shoulder meant she had withstood torture. The nine killmarks on her back, in one of the only areas that wasn't criss-crossed with ugly scars, meant she had protected herself and could hold her own. The braids in her hair meant she was one of the earthborn. The warpaint that she dragged under her cheeks when hunting only further established this.
Trikru members stopped glaring at her. Some even smiled.
The fifth month was when rain poured in buckets. Clarke was out on a week-long hunt, and took refuge with a trader called Niylah. Niylah made a fire and they sat around it, warming their hands and telling stories. Lincoln later complained that she was replacing his role as best friend. Clarke smacked a kiss on his cheek and told him he was stupid.
Anya gifted her with two long swords after she saved the life of a little girl, when Nyko was away, and Clarke didn't hate the way she exchanged feral grins with the Trikru commander. She was a different girl than the one who had fallen from the sky, but she was fine with that.
Three men from Azgeda kidnapped her, as their queen wanted the "skyperson" on her side. Clarke killed them and returned to TonDC with their braids swinging off her jacket sleeves. Lincoln hugged her, which was surprising, and Artigas looked so relieved that she pulled him close and tousled his hair. Niylah gave her three new killmarks and told her that she was reckless. Clarke shrugged.
She met Roan soon after, in another kidnapping attempt. She killed his companion and he stabbed her foot. She swore to help him overthrow his mother and lift his banishment when she could, using her reputation, and he let her go. She wasn't sure if she could uphold her part of the deal.
Indra no longer fantasied about killing her slowly, and instead brought her to Polis and arranged, miraculously, for Clarke to be officially under Lexa's protection. Killing Clarke would be an act of war. Clarke didn't need to be protected, but she was admittedly kind of glad that the kidnappings would stop. Lincoln was even more happy than she was.
Roan's banishment was lifted, and he bowed to Clarke. Nia tried killing Clarke, Lexa killed her, and Roan was King. Lexa congratulated her and Clarke smiled. She was responsible for what she'd made of herself, and she belonged to no one. Her legacy was made by her and her alone.
Clarke returned to her bunker most nights, and she liked it there. It was her safe haven, and only Lincoln and Nyko knew it's location. Her drawings decorated the room, reaching from floor to roof, her spears, swords, arrows, bow and quiver, and few daggers leaned against the wall, and her bed was covered with blankets and furs. She had more clothes; no longer having only her clothes from space, and a fog horn sat on the desk. Waterskins and dried meat hung from ropes suspended across the room, and berries were collected in jars. It was home.
She accidentally ate jobi notes, one night. Her dad appeared before her and Clarke hugged him an never wanted to let him go. He told her to forgive her mother. Who we are and who we need to be to survive are two very different things, he said. Clarke nodded. It felt like closure, even if she wouldn't forgive her mother's actions, not yet.
At the end of her sixth month, something came crashing down from the sky. Clarke watched it, mouth open, and then she was running faster than she ever had before. she met Anya in TonDC, and Anya watched her carefully.
"I will watch them," Clarke said.
"Remember the terms of our treaty, Clarke," Anya replied in Trigadesleng, and Clarke nodded.
"Of course," she said simply, and Anya wavered.
"Do you need warriors to company you?"
Clarke grinned fleetingly. She was a warrior. "I'll be good," she promised. "Thank you."
Anya smiled and they clasped arms. "Be safe," Anya said. "Your time has not yet come." Clarke smiled and repeated the sentiment.
As she headed out of the gate, people stopped what they were doing and watched. Zaphin, a little boy who Lincoln called her shadow, come out worriedly, and Clarke crouched down and assured him everything was fine. Eight-year-olds Talulla and Timone asked her if all skypeople were like her. Clarke grinned and tweaked their noses. "Maybe," she said simply, and they nodded. Thirteen-year-old Nasiya placed her bone dagger in Clarke's hand and curled her fingers over it. Clarke felt strong affection well up inside her as the adults in the village nodded solemnly or placed a hand over their hearts.
Clarke bumped into Lincoln's side, as he had appeared, and he nudged her back. She kissed Atrigas's forehead and grinned at his disgust- which covered worry and excitement,- and Lincoln went all the way to the statue with her.
"You be safe," he told her, and she nodded firmly. Lincoln knew most about her people, and he alone knew how little love she had for them now. "I will," she promised, and he touched their foreheads together. He watched her leap into the trees and sighed, steeling himself for whatever the future held.