A/N: Hey everyone! Just a heads up that we just moved house and I've got lots of exams and projects coming up, so I don't have much time to write right now, but I'll do my best! Enjoy the chapter, and feel free to leave me a review! ;) xx
"What did you do?" Clarke looks up, surprised, just in time to see Raven storming in, cheeks flushed from more than just the morning chill, fists clenched.
"What?" Raven storms up to her, leaving them nose to nose, and bares her teeth angrily, brows low on her face.
"What did you do?" She repeats, less angrily and a bit more devastated. A sinking feeling begins to form in Clarke's stomach.
"Raven," she says, trying to stay calm, "I don't know what you're talking about."
Raven scofffs and pushes away, and Clarke slowly puts down the walkie-talkie she'd been holding. "What happened?"
Raven turns briefly to her and then spins away, one hand on her waist and the other pressing against her forehead and through her hair. "What do you think?" She cries, voice too loud. "He broke up with me!"
Clarke deflates, worry giving way to anger. "He- what? Raven, what happened?"
Raven faces her again, and Clarke can see, for the first time, the tears in her eyes. "I knew he was different, of course I did, Finn and I- I know everything about him, or I used to, of course I knew he'd changed, I knew he liked you, but I thought-" She takes a breath. "I was cutting his hair and he said we needed to talk and I didn't want to talk, I wanted to move on, y'know, and then he said- he said- we should take a break." She laughs; a suddenly brittle sound. "A break. Finn and I, I've known him forever, he's my world, I love him, and he- he said we needed a break." She looks at Clarke and crumples, and Clarke instinctively puts her arms around the feisty mechanic, putting aside her own feelings on the matter aside for Raven. (She'd thought it was over, she'd foolishly believed the problem to be solved, god she'd been so stupid.)
"Are you-" Raven's voice is choked but Clarke knows what she's going to say.
"No. Raven, I told him he needed to stop chasing after me and go back to you." Raven sniffles and Carke pulls back to look into her eyes, keeping a firm grip oon her arms, and cracks a smile for the Latina before her. "Raven, you literally moved heaven and earth to be with him. If he doesn't see that, at least right now, then that's nobody's fault but his own. Yeah?"
Raven gives a watery chuckle and Clarke grins. "Yeah," she agrees. "For now."
"C'mon, Clarke," says Jasper, and Clarke resists the temptation to throw a wrench at the younger boy.
"I said no, Jasper," she reminds him, and he pouts.
"Please."
"No."
"Monty will cry."
"What?"
"I swear on my mother's life, Monty will actually cry. Real tears."
"...Fine."
"Yes!" Jasper pumps his fist in victory and runs outside to alert the others that Clarke, ice princess and scary doctor extraordinaire, will be participating in the most frivolous of events: unity day. Sure, Clarke knows the theory behind it isn't frivolous whatsoever. Peace, unity, strength in numbers- all things she believes in and all things she needs to embody right now, but over the decades unity day had evolved from a respectful day of thanksgiving into a time to get loud, drunk, and rowdy, and Clarke happens to be in a camp full of juvenile delinquents.
The whoops from outside the dropship have been getting more and more rambunctious and Clarke rolls her eyes as she hears a very distinctly-jasper voice yell for someone to 'chug'. Roma looks up from where Calrke's bandaging her arm and grins. "Gonna join us, doc?" she asks with a cocky smirk and Clarke rolls her eyes again.
"Hm," she said, "we'll see. You're off duty for a week, got it? Tell Bellamy I mean it-"
"No need," says Roma with a careless shrug, inspecting the arm wrapping. "He told us to listen to you."
Clarke swallows her surprise and nods firmly. "You got that right," she says instead, "now go have fun." Roma winks and begins to saunter off, with Clarke calling a hasty "be careful!" behind her, chuckling as she wipes the blood off her hands with a grimy and very un-sanitary rag that'll have to do another day longer as nobody's really in a state to be fetching river water for the med bay.
Stepping outside the tent, Clarke is hit with a barrage of smiles, limbs, and drunken exclamations of her name. She hears Sterling bet Monroe his next week's entire shift of gaurd duty that she won't drink the whole night, when he thinks she can't hear, so Clarke promptly picks up a cup and gulps down the burning moonshine, and then downs another immediately after, winking at Sterling's astonished expression.
Unity day is fun, she decides a couple hours later, with Harper on one side of her and Monty on the other, laughing along as they regale Nathan Miller with tales of their lives on the ark. Unity day is fun, but not everybody's here to see it.
("Raven's not leaving the radio tent," sighed Fox, "she's so sad. I don't like it.")
The smile that lights up Raven's face as Clarke steps through the tent flaps is worth her remorse at leaving the party.
"I'm glad I met you," says Octavia, and Licoln smiles the smile that she knows he reserves for her and her alone.
"I'm glad I met you too," he says, voice gravelly, and she watches him as he hangs up the freshly-caught rabbit on his wall. His home is beautiful and intriguing and unique but it's got nothing on him. She knows that Bellamy thinks she's still the little girl hiding in the floorboards, but she isn't. She never wanted to hide under those floorboards anyways. The earth is letting a part of her free, a part she'd always had to lock up on the ark, and every day she spends on earth she feels a part of herself fall away and into the woman she's becoming.
"Lincoln," she says, and he turns with the hint of a smile on his lips. She leans forward from where she's perched on his little table and takes his face between her hands, smiling when he doesn't pull away, capturing his lips with her own. She feels contentment thrum in her heart as he wraps strong arms around her middle and carries her away.
The shouting draws them out, and Clarke just sighs. Raven looks up from her newly-dissected walkie-talkie and groans. "What now?" she complains, "What could possibly be wrong?" Clarke shrugs and jumps up, and Raven sets down her walkie-talkie in disappointment. "Just this once, Clarke, you should let them deal with it themselves," Raven says, "leave 'em out there to die. Just once, c'mon, oh." her teasing dwindles down as they step outside the tent and catch sight of the cause of the commotion.
It's the ark.
Or, rather, it's part of the ark. And it's soaring through the air, the aged metal a stark contrast to the night sky behind it.
And it's joyous screaming. Harper and Fox are dancing around the campfire, Sterling, Monty, and Jasper are whooping wildly, and Monroe and Miller are waving, guns dangling down their backs as their faces tilt towards the sky.
"Something's wrong," says Clarke, and Raven, beside her, exchanges a worried glance with her. "Something's wrong!"
The two women push their way through the growing crowd to reach Bellamy, who's staring at the falling ark with a clenched jaw. "Clarke," he says, when he sees them, sounding almost relieved: "What-"
"We don't know." Clarke cuts him off with no regret, eyes still fixated upon her long-past home, falling far too fast. "It's all wrong- it's going to fast. No parachute?" Icy cold fear is gripping her chest and she barely registers the sudden silence in the camp as people realise something's terribly off. "No, no, no-" Clarke says, her voice shaking for the first time in months.
Her mother said she'd be on the first exodus ship. This is the exodus ship. Clarke knows it with a certainty that sets her heart pounding, and brings her crashing to her knees as the delinquents begin to scream and cry.