A/N
Canon until 2x14
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Whenever her dad would pick her up from class on the Arc, every second day of the week, Clarke would notice words on his arm. One day, as she holds his hand walking out of the room she is level with the words 'remember to pick Clarke up' and she worriedly asks her dad why he would ever forget about her. Her dad only chuckles in return and explains that he had forgotten once - that time she had stayed for hours and played chess with Wells in the classroom - and that since then her mother had decided that Jake definitely needed a reminder every time it was his day off from work. Clarke didn't really understand why her mother was writing on her father's hand instead of just telling him, since she had to be with him to but she decided that it was okay as long as it made sure that he didn't forget again.
Clarke is thirteen the first time it happens. She is brushing her teeth and stops to stare in wonder at the black curves that appear on her arm. She doesn't know why this is happening yet, but she doesn't feel scared. The drawing on her hand is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen.
She thinks about it more when is under the covers with a torch and a book that she was given by her dad. The cover is worn out and the pages are frayed and this is because it is Clarke's favourite book in the whole world. It's from before the bombs and tells the story of Mulan, a girl who fought to save her people. Clarke doesn't even know how many times she has read the book but tonight the it sits closed somewhere under the covers with her and Clarke has been pointing the torch at her hand for so long that after a while her skin starts to burn. But the drawing is of tall trees in a forest that wind around one another and dig into the earth - something she has only ever seen in books. So she doesn't stop.
It is after Jake and Abby explain to her what a soulmate is the next morning that Clarke decides she wants to be an artist.
Clarke never gets the chance to even try to liven up the walls of the Arc with her art because the only place she can see now is the inside of her cell. The inside of her cell is full of pictures of places she has only ever seen pictures of. Clarke has drawn birds and the sea and the sky and pictures of the ground she wishes she could see but the largest, most detailed drawing is on the floor of her cell and every day Clarke tries to avoid stepping on any part of the drawing, scared to death by the possibility of spoiling the forest on her floor.
By the time Clarke gets to the ground, she has craved it for years. Others in the Arc had wanted to see the ground too, but not in the way Clarke had. They could have never felt the way that Clarke did when she finally saw, with her own eyes, the trees she had been imagining ever since she was thirteen.
She breathed in the smell of soil, felt the water on her face, that had fallen from the sky, just like she had, but nothing compared to the freedom she felt when she saw the trees. Maybe it was because green was her favourite colour and she had missed colour in her cell, but Clarke knew it was because her soulmate had never drawn anything but the trees that had haunted her ever since she had seen them.
She remembered how she had tried to write to her soulmate right after the trees, taking hours to think of the perfect thing to say, and how she ended up only writing 'Hi, what is your name?' and waiting days for a reply and feeling so inadequate and so weak that she stopped reading Mulan for a month. She remembered being fifteen and finally deciding that her drawings were good enough to draw on her skin, and even though she now had paintings hanging around all the classrooms on the Arc, feeling her stomach churn and her hands wobble like they hadn't since before she really started drawing. She had thought, maybe her soulmate was nervous and only communicated through drawing, so she waited again, and again nothing came in reply.
For years after she wandered around the Arc looking for marks on someone else's skin to tell her she wasn't alone. This never came either. She told herself she was lucky that she had at least been able to communicate with her soulmate once, most people didn't even get that. Of everyone she knew on the Arc, she only knew of her parents and one other couple who bore each other's markings.
Standing on the ground, staring at the trees, Clarke is more sure than ever that the drawing she had once seen was not merely a product of her teenage mind's need for freedom.
Clarke does not have time for soulmates. She decides this once she hears Jasper's gut-wrenching screams as she tries desperately to save him. Life on the ground was about survival. Soulmates were a distraction. Love was a distraction.
Despite this, Clarke still finds herself praying every night that her soulmate is okay, and that the reason they had never replied was not because Clarke hadn't been able to save them from something she could never have known about.
After Wells' death and Raven's arrival, she finds herself thinking about her dad and how much she wishes she could talk to him about it, and she thinks about her mum and doesn't understand how you could do that to your soulmate. She thinks about Finn and how right she was about love being a distraction because now Raven is back and Clarke spends a lot of her time feeling so alone while she should be doing more productive things.
When Clarke sees Lexa for the first time, she sees Heda.
'You are the one that burned 300 of my warriors.'
'You are the one who sent them there to kill us.'
And she knows she hates the ground now because she doesn't apologise for burning 300 people who probably had families and soulmates of their own.
When Lexa kisses her she is shocked. She wasn't aware that she could feel desire like this. She wasn't aware that she could want anything more than she had wanted to see the trees. God, Lexa's eyes are so green.
She can't do this. She can't separate Lexa's breathless whispered soft words from Finn's last ever words to her. 'I'm scared'. She also realises how perfectly his last words fit how she feels. And she wishes that she and Lexa had met at another time, where she still believed in love and they were not in the middle of a war.
She is looking at maps in Lexa's tent again when she remembers that she still has pens from the box of art supplies Finn brought her somewhere. When she eventually finds them she uses them to draw ways of attack on Lexa's maps and is so engrossed in what she is doing that she doesn't hear Lexa walk into the tent.
"Klark", says Lexa.
Clarke is startled and turns around with the pen still in her hand.
"Lexa. I was looking at routes of attack and I have recorded some on the maps.", says Clarke
"Klark, these maps are not to be drawn on. We do not have many copies and do not have time to make more", Lexa runs her hands through her hair with a grimace.
"No Lexa just listen to me, look at the routes I have drawn. Unless you have no faith in me you will understand that I did not just waste ink and ruin maps for fun"
Lexa grabs the maps from Clarke's hands. After a moment of studying she also grabs the pen.
"Clarke this route may actually -" Lexa stops as Clarke grabs her hand. "Clarke? I thought you said you were not ready" she says as she takes a cautious step away from Clarke.
Clarke holds up Lexa's palm next to her own and sees matching splashes of ink from where the pen grazed Clarke as Lexa had taken it out of her hands.
"Clark?" asks Lexa. "Why did you not write back?" whispers Clarke, and Lexa suddenly realises what Clarke is talking about because she has never forgotten the drawing of an arrow that appeared on her hand one day.
"I did not know what it meant", says Lexa gripping Clarke's hand. Clearly the story hadn't been passed down through generations on the ground like it had with the Skykru.
They spend the rest of the night in Lexa's bed with Clarke explaining the stories of soulmates, and how Clarke looked for her for years, and Lexa tells Clarke how scared she was when marks first started appearing on her, and how she hid them for fear of being ridiculed.
Under the covers and wrapped around Lexa, Clarke recalls the most exciting story she read as a child. Mulan fought for her people out of love. Love is strength.
When they finally fall asleep, Lexa promises to spread this story, and to command her people to write on their hands more often. Clarke thinks that that is a weird way of putting it but doesn't disagree with Lexa.
Mount weather falls, and Clarke realises that she has found her own Mulan.
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I can't believe I am writing soulmate AU fanfic in the middle of the night apart from I kind of can?
Review please :)