Author's note: we had a few fluffy chapters, but things will need to get a bit dark again, so fair warning. This chapter is going to go into some detail of what happened those 18 days.
Chapter 16
Two weeks went by with them falling into a sort of routine. Clarke continued to heal and, after about a week, was able to walk around the camp with her friends or Lexa. She'd even had a few casual conversations with random Arkadians and one hard one with her mother. Lexa was typically busy doing this or that, but they fell asleep every night in each other's arms, though Lexa hadn't kissed her again. Clarke tried to pretend it didn't bother her.
Mentally, she was also healing. She still had moments when she knew she wasn't thinking quite right or would forget something simple, but they were becoming rarer. She'd even remembered shoes the first time she'd gotten dressed on her own. Granted, she'd forgotten how to lace and tie them. She'd stared at them on her feet for far too long as Lexa had gotten herself dressed. Finally, she had looked at Lexa in confusion, knowing something wasn't right with them. Lexa had sat and gently said she needed to tie them. She shook her head thinking about how Lexa had had to reteach her how to tie her shoes, but now that skill had come back. She had also found that the majority of her mental issues related to mundane things, like clothing or pens, while more complex things, like reasoning and logic, were more or less intact. Most of the time anyhow.
She'd also had a few one on one conversations with each of her friends. Bellamy had tried to broach hard subjects, but had backed off from them when he noticed how uncomfortable she had gotten, instead focusing on just reconnecting. Jasper had avoided hard conversations like the plague and mostly focused on trying to make her laugh.
Emotionally, she was a wall. She still didn't talk about what had happened, only referencing injuries in a clinical way or, very rarely, referencing it as what they did or when she was there. She seemed to mostly be trying to ignore it, but things always had a way of coming out.
About a week after Lexa came back, the nightmares started. No, not just nightmares, night terrors where she would kick and scream and cry, unable to be reached. The first time it had happened, Octavia and Lincoln had burst into the room, weapons at the ready, to fight whatever was threatening her, but this was something they couldn't fight for her. Lexa would try to calm her, holding her once she'd calmed down enough, still trapped in the nightmare, whispering sweetly in Trigedasleng. Sometimes she would fall back into sleep, others she would wake up with tears still streaming down her face. Sometimes she would remember them, other times she would just wake up with a sense of dread and no memory of what the dream contained.
Clarke wondered if her new habit of screaming all night was a part of why Lexa would no longer kiss her. Lexa was still affectionate in other ways, but it still stung. Maybe Lexa had finally realized what a mess Clarke was. Maybe seeing all the scars and hearing her scream had made kissing her repulsive. Clarke couldn't blame her if she did, but it still stung.
She was also aware that Lexa would need to leave at some point. She'd said that she would be able to stay for six weeks. Clarke wondered how she would handle it when Lexa left again and desperately wanted to go with her, but also didn't want to saddle her with an emotional wreck, scarred, and slightly brain-damaged charge. So, she tried to focus on just enjoying what time she had with her, forcing those bad memories down, pretending she was okay.
Unfortunately, Lexa, Raven, and Octavia had other plans. Given the night-time ritual of Clarke screaming and her daytime ritual of trying to act like she was perfectly fine, they felt that it was time for an intervention. They had all grown closer, Raven still staying with Octavia and Lincoln in the front of the cabin, spending most of her day with Clarke. Octavia and Lincoln joked that they were her guards, but Raven was actually her official babysitter.
So, the day came where Lexa didn't leave after the morning meal. Given how they were all looking at her, and how Lincoln had left the room, Clarke knew something was up.
"Clarke," Lexa stated carefully, "we need to talk."
Clarke felt her blood freeze, but decided to pretend like she didn't know what they were talking about, "About what?"
Lexa sighed. She knew that Clarke knew what they needed to talk about, especially when she suddenly refused to look at them.
"Clarke, you know what we need to talk about," she said.
"No, I don't," Clarke said, suddenly very interested in the blanket on the bed, holding it in her hands and examining it closely.
"We need to talk about what happened to you in the dropship," Lexa responded quietly.
"No, we don't," Clarke said curtly, "You all know what happened. We don't need to talk about it. I'm fine."
"You're not fine, Clarke," Octavia said, reaching for Clarke's hand that she swiftly pulled back.
"I'm fine," she said through gritted teeth.
"You're having nightmares. Even if you don't want to talk about it, it's coming out in other ways," Raven said, trying to break through.
"You all already know what happened!" Clarke threw her hands up in agitation, "Why do I need to tell you what everyone already knows?"
"Clarke," Lexa said softly, trying again to get Clarke to look at her, "we don't." That made Clarke finally look up, pain in her eyes. "We know what Bellamy saw and heard, what Octavia and the others saw. We know what your injuries were from your mom, but we don't know what happened. You were there for 18 days. We need to know what happened, not just what the results were."
Clarke looked down again. She didn't want to talk about this. She'd hoped that she'd never have to talk about this. But she revisited it every night in her dreams and randomly throughout the day. She knew it was probably needed, but she didn't even know how to say it, how to organize everything they did into words.
"I don't even know how to start," she whispered after a long moment.
"Why don't we start from the beginning? Maybe if we ask questions it'll be easier to just answer those rather than trying to tell it all at once," Lexa said. Clarke took a deep breath and then nodded. "Okay, how about after you left Polis. John Murphy was with you, but Indra said you arrived alone?"
Clarke let a small smile grace her lips thinking about her last conversation with Murphy. She chose her words carefully, not wanting to break Murphy's trust, "I ordered him to not come with me. After his adventure with Jaha, he had started building a life away from Arkadia. I couldn't take that from him, so I told him to go back to it. He tried to argue, but I wouldn't budge." She had rolled her eyes when she referred to Jaha and Murphy's ill-fated quest as an adventure.
"So, I suppose I won't have to put a bounty out on his head then," Lexa said after a moment.
"Lexa…" Clarke said in slight reprimand, knowing the Commander was teasing. Hopefully, anyhow.
"Okay, then you met with Indra and she told you where Octavia and the others had been. She said she walked you as far as she could. That was the last time anyone saw you until Bellamy found you. What happened after you left Indra?" Lexa implored.
Clarke took another deep breath. This was getting to the parts she desperately didn't want to talk about, but she'd agreed to try. "I walked to where Indra said the cave was. I thought I could just see the outline of it when I heard them behind me. They had their guns on me, so I put up my hands. I had come to try to reason with people, so I wanted to appear non-threatening," she said.
"You could see the cave?" Octavia asked, a bit of disbelief in her voice. Clarke had been so close, "Why didn't you yell for us?"
Clarke shook her head, "I should have. In hindsight, I should have, but I didn't know if it was the right cave or if you were even still in it. I also didn't want them to think it was a trap; they seemed trigger happy and I didn't want to risk anyone getting hurt."
Octavia leaned back slightly. She wished she hadn't been so mad at Clarke or had known she was coming. She might have been within earshot of when Clarke was taken.
"What happened then?" Lexa kept the conversation going; they could deal with their own guilt later.
"I told them I was there to speak to Pike and they said they'd take me to him. They made me take off my jacket and give them any weapons. They patted me down to check that there weren't any hidden and found my two knives," Clarke didn't want to continue, so she stopped. She had answered the question.
"What did they do then? Did they take you to Pike?" Lexa wasn't going to let her stop there.
Clarke shook her head after a moment, "No, they ordered me to walk and keep my hands in the air. I tried to talk to them, but they jabbed me with the gun every time I tried to talk."
They gave Clarke a moment before Lexa asked quietly, "What happened then, Clarke?"
Clarke swallowed and tried to blink back the tears. She didn't want to talk, no matter how much she needed to. She took another deep breath, "They brought me to the dropship and put my hands in the shackles. I didn't even fight them on it. I just let them do it." She looked back at the blanket that she was still worrying with her hands, "I don't know why I didn't even try to fight."
"You didn't have much of a choice, Clarke. It was you against two armed men in a confined space," Raven said.
Clarke wasn't sure she believed that, but chose not to address it. After a moment, she decided to continue, to get the easy parts out of the way, "Dirks went to go get Pike and Johnson stayed to guard me. After a while, I heard Dirks and Pike come back. Pike questioned me and I told him what I knew, but he was convinced that the grounders were using the blockade to weaken us before they attacked. I told him that that wasn't true, that the blockade had been my idea. Then he said that I'd just confessed to treason and it was a Capital crime. He told Johnson and Dirks to get info out of me using any means necessary, since I'd already been sentenced to death…then he left."
Clarke hadn't realized that she'd slowly scooted back from her friends and had pushed herself into a ball when she was talking. Her arms were now wrapped around her legs, her knees pressed up against her chest. She lay her face down on them and shook her head, her voice slightly muffled, "I can't…please, I can't…"
They gave her some time. They knew this was incredibly hard for her; it was hard enough just to hear the little bit that they had. After a bit, Lexa moved back closer to Clarke. She didn't put her arms around her like she wanted to, but sat close enough for their sides to be touching.
"Maybe it would be easier if we eased into it, rather than going from start to finish. We know what your injuries were, but not how they happened. Can we ask about specific injuries?" she asked quietly after another few minutes of just sitting.
Clarke thought for a minute before nodding her head into her knees. After taking a few more minutes, she raised her head, but still refused to look at anyone.
Lexa took the lead again, "Both your arms were dislocated. How did that happen?"
Clarke tilted her head back until it gently hit the wall and she was looking at the ceiling, "It was towards the beginning. Probably the first day, but I couldn't keep track of time," her voice cracked a bit at the end, her mind reliving what had happened. She took another deep breath before continuing, "I had tried to fight back by then. Dirks was in front of me…touching me. They'd cut off my clothes already. I was able to grab onto the chain and pull myself up. I kicked Dirks with both legs so hard he fell backwards. That made them both mad. Johnson had Dirks grab my legs together and pull so that I was stretched out as far as the chain would allow. Then Johnson wrapped his arms around my chest and pulled until there was a pop. That was the first time I had screamed. He went to the other side and did the same thing. I blacked out."
Clarke's voice held no emotion by the end. Lexa was having trouble controlling her rage. They had intentionally dislocated both arms so she couldn't fight back. She didn't know why that surprised her, but she felt sick thinking about just how systematically they had tortured her. She leaned in to Clarke slightly before glancing at Octavia and Raven. Their faces showed that they were feeling the same rage.
She decided to move on to other injuries, or illnesses, that Clarke had had when she was brought in, "Okay, what about the pneumonia? Do you remember when you started feeling ill?"
Clarke scoffed a bit, "As soon as I came to after they kept dunking my head in the tub of water when I didn't give them the answers they wanted and held me under too long."
Lexa felt like she had been zapped. She had almost hope that Clarke had gotten sick due to malnutrition and exposure lowering her immune system, but even that was caused directly by their hand. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back to the wall, trying to push back the pain and rage of what they had done. Not for the first time, she fought with herself about going back to Polis and doing to Pike what he had done to Clarke.
She lifted her head back up at that moment, looking back at Clarke, "And Pike? He participated in all of this?"
Clarke sounded almost dreamy, lost in the memories, her mind trying to numb herself, "No, he was actually pissed when he saw me the next time and I was naked, but the ends would justify the means if they could make me talk. He'd question me and have them whip me or hit me or whatever. They were never as cruel when he was there."
"But he knew," it was Octavia that made the statement, her hatred for Pike renewing as she thought about him seeing what they had done and still letting it continue. Without getting his own hands dirty, of course.
"Yeah," was the small reply from Clarke.
This was enough for today. Clarke was closing in on herself. She'd pushed herself as far as she could and she felt absolutely spent. She just wanted to curl in a ball and sleep. She put her head back down on her knees, her whole body beginning to shake, though her eyes had completely dried of tears. She felt utterly numb.
"Clarke?" Lexa said softly.
"No more. I can't…no more. I just want to sleep and not think. Please," was the muffled, emotionless reply.
Lexa pulled Clarke into her arms and was a little concerned when she got no response from Clarke, though she could feel how hard she was shaking, almost vibrating. Then, there were other arms wrapped around both of them, cocooning Clarke in them. Clarke, even in her numb state, knew what they were expressing: they were cocooning her in their love and protection. For some reason, that brought back her emotions and she clung to their arms as her shaking turned into sobs.