The Dream
These walls are really starting to feel like they’re closing in on Clarke. She’s been trapped in this room for what feels like her entire life and she has more than accepted the fact that she will never see anything outside of this steel prison. Well, at least until she takes that one last stroll through the Ark on her way to the floating air lock. “The Ark that was nothing more than a bigger steel prison,” Clarke thinks. She has always thirsted for something better, for something bigger, for something more. Haunted by dreams of the ground and all the delights, and terrors, that it was sure to hold-that is what decorates the walls between which Clarke is trapped. Drawings-imaginations brought to life-surround her. Visions of a life filled with more than anything the Ark had ever, or really could ever, offer her.
Clarke never really had any lasting hope of witnessing the things she’s drawn in person. They were supposed to remain on the Ark for at least another hundred years-well past her lifetime. She supposes her current shortened life expectancy isn’t such a hardship then. “Not like much would have changed. I’d have lived and died in space, wishing for nothing more than to be on the ground. Hardly a loss,” Clarke said to herself. “It was worth it.” She knows it was. The people of the Ark deserve to know the truth and she would make the same choices all over again if it meant there was a chance of warning them. Her father was right and he got floated for it. The only saving grace Clarke had was her age. “That isn’t going to matter for much longer,” Clarke huffs.
Looking down at the watch that once belonged to her father as it ticks away the minutes closer and closer to Clarke’s eighteenth birthday, and her execution, her eyes are drawn to the tattoo beneath it, the tattoo that’s been there just about as long as she can remember. It is simple and elegant all at once. It is also painful and devastating because now it is just a reminder of everything Clarke will never get to have. She traces over the lines of the name-written in the most serene and beautiful script she could have ever imagined, and Clarke is an artist.
Lexa.
Clarke has had this tattoo since she was eleven. She can remember the pain of it waking her up in the middle of the night, body in a fever pitch, feeling like her wrist was being sawed off. Her screams woke her mother, who rushed into the room to comfort a screaming, terrified Clarke as the final line was being drawn to complete the x in her name. Clarke had heard the stories, had known this was going to happen. Her mother and father had showed her theirs, Jake and Abigail respectfully, permanently inked on the insides of their wrists. She knew this was how it worked: you wake up one day to find your soulmates name indelibly written on your wrist. Clarke just hadn’t been prepared for it to happen then, on her eleventh birthday.
As the story goes, you are supposed to receive your soulmate designation on your sixteenth birthday, when it was believed you would be mature enough to handle that information. No one before Clarke had ever received their mark before that age. No one after her had either. She was an anomaly, something the rest of the kids on the Ark never failed to remind her of. It wasn’t so much bullying as hushed whispers in the hallways, in classrooms. Talk of how she was the youngest to ever receive their mark. Murmurs of how it was unprecedented that an eleven year old got marked, of how different Clarke was, how different she had to be because of it.
Her parents tried to figure out how it happened. Jake and Abby both delved into research, tried to find anything that would help explain the situation their only child found herself in. They constantly came up empty handed. No one had any answers. Jake wanted to keep Clarke’s mark a secret, worried that it would make his little girl a target for ridicule, or worse. It wasn’t until Abby reminded him of the program that he relented. Well not at first.
“Screw the program Abby! This is Clarke we’re talking about! Our Clarke! Our daughter!” was Jake’s initial response. Abby just closed her eyes and hung her head. “I know it’s Clarke, Jake. But you know as well as I do that this can’t be kept a secret. Not for long. Not with Ark technology at work!” Abby said. Jake stopped his pacing to join his wife on their couch, “What do we do then Abby? She’s eleven! Tell me what we do. Tell me how we protect her. How do I protect my little girl?” At this Abby looked up and met the iridescent blue eyes of her husband, eyes that also belonged to her daughter. Cupping Jake’s face in her hands she whispered, “I don’t know Jake. I don’t know how to protect Clarke. I don’t know if we can.”
Ark technology was always something to be admired. Lightyears ahead of anything left behind on the ground 97 years ago, it was more of a living, breathing entity than hardware and software. From full body scanners that could detect the common cold to microchips that prevented pregnancy, the technology on the Ark, the technology that was the Ark was unparalleled.
The most esteemed technology was the program Jake and Abby referred to. An AI driven interface known simply as “the program” it was rumored to be part science, part magic. It tracked the citizens of the Ark and their marks. Scanners in the hallways would transmit captures of marks on the people of the Ark to the program mainframe. They did this unprompted, through clothing and jewelry. So when Abby said there was no hiding this, she meant there was no hiding it. As soon as Clarke left their living quarters her mark would be catalogued and anyone in a position of authority on the Ark would know that an eleven year old had received a designation. Abby’s status as a member of the council did not protect Clarke from the gossip that was sure to follow. Or the questions that Ark leaders were sure to ask.
Clarke, at eleven years old, didn’t know what her parents were worried about protecting her from. Clarke, at eleven, thought she’d have to wait another five years to experience this excitement. Clarke, at eleven, relished in the happiness she was being promised because she had a soulmate. Clarke, at eleven years and a few months old, found out. That’s when the whispers started. Everywhere she went the murmurs followed, and as a result her parents dove back into their search for answers, coming up fruitless again. The only conclusion that was drawn was that the connection Clarke would share with her soulmate would be unrivaled in its strength.
There was only one issue with this conclusion. It was that there was no guarantee that this Lexa was Clarke’s soulmate: because a soulmate designation was only one of two tattoos that you could expect to get. The other would be the name of your greatest enemy. The best part though? There was no way to tell which name was which until you came into contact with the person attached to one of the names on your wrists. All you could do was hope that you didn’t end up with the same name on both wrists, something that had only happened once in the entire history of the Ark.
It was hardly ever mentioned anymore it had happened so long ago. In the very early days of the Ark, before the Ark even was the Ark really, when the hope for the continuance of the human race was first thrust into space, there was a man and a woman with identical tattoos on their wrists. They met when they were eighteen, both confused and lost and wondering how to handle a situation where they were both each other’s soulmates and each other’s greatest enemies. At first there was hope that while the names were identical, that they didn’t belong to the same people. After all, there were twelve other stations with people to search through. The couple searched the mainframe over and over, holding onto the faith that life could not be so cruel as to assign them the same person as both soulmate and enemy.
It quickly became obvious that such a hope was without merit. There were no others with the couple’s names. Life never promises anyone that it will be fair, or kind, or considerate. This couple destined to constantly come together and tear each other apart, went down in history as the only recorded pairing of soulmates and enemies. It was believed that they spent the rest of their lives separated, suffering through the immense pain that came with finding your soulmate and then living apart from them.
The entrance of two guards into her room drew Clarke from her reverie. Not that guards were unusual, she was imprisoned after all, but she was in solitary. The only time she really ever saw guards were during meal times. Two men armed with shock batons entered her room and drew her up from the floor. Mistaking the wristband they locked around her as a sign that she was about to be executed she resisted. “I’m not eighteen yet! I have another month left! You’re early! You can’t do this!” she yelled. “I’m still a minor, you can’t float me yet! I’m not ready!” The guards paid her no mind as they attempted to remove the watch from her wrist, “You won’t be needing this where you’re going little girl,” said the taller of the two. Clarke fought back with everything she had, refusing to give up the last piece of her father that she had left. She broke free from their grip and ran into the hallway, straight into the arms of….. “Mom?!” Clarke whispered.
“Easy baby. Easy. It’s okay Clarke,” said Abby. Reaching up to brush an errant curl out of her daughters face, Abby met the clear blue eyes swirling with confusion. “Mom, what the….what’s going on? I’m still seventeen. They can’t float me.” Abby hushed her daughter, offering the kind of comfort only a mother could. “You’re not getting floated baby. You’re going to the ground,” Abby explained. Clarke, if possible, was even more confused by this. “What do you mean going to the ground? We’re supposed to be here another like hundred…” Clarke’s sentence was cut short by the tranquilizer the guards injected her with. Steadily losing consciousness, Clarke could barely focus on her mother’s face as she imparted one last sentence on her only child. With a kiss to Clarke’s forehead Abby gently prayed, “May we meet again.”
One of the guards took Clarke from Abby’s arms, lifting her without effort and carrying her down the hallway. Abby wiped the tears from her face and headed back to the control room in Alpha Station, where the launch of the dropship holding the hundred delinquents would be monitored. The Council had come to this decision despite her best efforts, biased though they might have been. Abby, as Chief Medical Officer and a Council member, knew that something had to be done. The catastrophic failure of the life support system on the Ark that her husband had discovered wasn’t something that could be fixed. It was clear that other options had to be explored, she just disagreed with the decision to send a hundred kids to the ground without knowing if it was even survivable.
They were seen as expendable because they were all criminals, all sentenced to be floated once they were of age, so even if they didn’t survive the trip, or if the planet was still too saturated with radiation to be livable, it wasn’t truly a loss in the eyes of the council. That was, of course, because none of them had children among those hundred, none except Abby. All that was left for Abby to do was monitor the situation as closely as possible, and find a way to hope, beyond all reason, that not only would they survive the drop to Earth, but that they would be able to find a way to Mount Weather, otherwise the lot of them were as good as dead.
Clarke came to some twenty minutes later, already strapped into the dropship and surrounded by ninety-nine other underage criminals. Shaking the fog from her head, she looked around and came face to face with none other than Wells Jaha, Chancellor’s son and her former best friend. “You’ve got to be kidding me? I’m being sent to Earth with a group of teenage delinquents, a trip I might not even survive, and on top of that I have to be sitting next to the person responsible for my father’s death? I’d like to float myself right now,” Clarke thought.
“Are you alright Clarke?” said Wells, clearly nervous. Clarke turned sharp eyes on him and said, “I’m great Wells. Why the hell are you here?” Wells swallowed and explained that he got himself arrested shortly before the dropship was launched to make sure she would be okay. “Oh so NOW you care? NOW you want to be a friend? You know when I could have used you as a friend Wells? When I trusted you not to say anything about my dad, but you couldn’t do that could you? You’re the reason he’s dead! You’re the reason I’m even here right now! Just leave me alone. Don’t look at me, don’t talk to me. And once we’re on the ground, IF we survive, stay as far away from me as possible.”
The trip took what felt simultaneously like five minutes and five years. Three idiots unstrapped themselves and were doing acrobatics in the air by Clarke’s head, obviously wishing for injury or death. “If you three don’t strap yourselves back in you’ll be the first to die on this godforsaken trip,” she warned them. “Ease up Princess, try to enjoy yourself,” the one with the wavy brown hair replied. “I’ll enjoy myself when we’re on the ground, hopefully not being poisoned by radiation, and I can get away from all of you people, especially you Mr. I Wasted Three Months of Oxygen,” Clarke said. Before the spacewalker could come up with a response the dropship started rocking back and forth, and the two other kids floating with him ended up flying head first into the wall. Dead on impact, spacewalker sobered immediately and held on for dear life as the dropship passed through Earth’s atmosphere.
As the parachute deployed to slow their descent a message from Chancellor Jaha started playing. Clarke tuned most of it out; she knew it was mostly bluster and bravado. He explained that they were being sent to Earth to see if it was survivable, that if they cooperated and reported back that their crimes would be pardoned. Clarke noted that there was no mention of the failure of the life support system on the Ark-which was the real reason they got sent down here. That and the fact that as criminals they were all expendable.
The message cut out shortly after the Chancellor started to explain their wristbands, quickly followed by a very rough landing in what Clarke could only assume was a forest based on her Earth Skills classes. There was a commotion as everyone attempted to get out of their seats at once, to look out the windows, to experience life on the ground for the first time. They all rushed the door and only stopped when Clarke yelled, “Wait!” Taking a stand on the seat she had just vacated Clarke warned them, “If you open that door we could all be dead in minutes from radiation poisoning!”
An older boy in the back of the dropship answered her, “In that case Princess, we’re dead either way since we have no food or water in here. Might as well see what the ground is all about, even if we only survive for sixty seconds.” Clarke’s reply was cut off by a yell of “Bellamy?!” from across the ship. A girl no older than 16 stood up on her row of seats to get a better look of where the voice was coming from. “Bellamy is that you?!”
“Octavia?” the one called Bellamy answered. They met in the middle, a reunion seemingly years in the making if the hug they exchanged was anything to judge by. “I thought I was never going to see you again Bell. Wait how am I seeing you? Why are you here?” asked Octavia. “My sister, my responsibility. Did you really think I would let them send you to the ground without me here to protect you O?” Bellamy said with a grin. Cries of “Sister?!” echoed through the dropship. Everyone knew who they were then. The Blake siblings-Bellamy and Octavia- whose mother got floated when Octavia was discovered living under the floor in their quarters, being kept a secret because of the one child rule imposed on the Ark.
“It’s the girl from under the floor!” someone yelled out. Octavia scowled and moved to show this person exactly what she thought of that remark only to be held back by her brother. “Why don’t you give them something else to talk about O? Like being the first human on the ground in a hundred years? What do you say?” said Bellamy. “What are we waiting for then big brother? Open that bad boy and let’s hit the ground,” Octavia grinned.
Bellamy punched the button to open the dropship door. Before it had even opened all the way the delinquents crowded around it, trying to peer outside, equal parts intrigued and afraid of what the ground had in store for them. Taking two, three, four steps out of the door Octavia Blake’s feet hit the dirt of the forest floor, the sound drowned out by her easy yell of “We’re back bitches!!” “Well,” Clarke thought, “that’s one way to announce our presence. Remember Clarke, this was your dream when your reality sucked. You wanted the ground. Now you have it. Hopefully it really was a dream, and not a nightmare. Here goes nothing.” With that, Clarke Griffin stepped out of the dropship door and onto solid ground for the first time in her seventeen years, unaware that her life was about to change drastically because of it.