[fic] shall i play the hunted? (1/13)

Jun 02, 2014 23:31

fic: shall i play the hunted?
fandom: the 100
characters:Clarke, Bravenlarke, Flarke, Octavia/Lincoln, Finn, Abbie, Anya, ensemble
word count: ~1200
summary: in the stories, red riding hood was seduced by a wolf and saved by a huntsman. there’s never been a case of stars and girls with eyes as sharp as knives. this isn’t your grandmother’s tale (or maybe it always was)

a/n: going to plan on a chapter to coincide with each episode for now and depending on how this works/what canon does in the next two weeks, it may go longer. too soon to say.

[Mothers, she decided at too young an age to change her mind, were secrets and control and hiding.]When Clarke woke up in the drop ship her first thought should have been damn I don’t have my pills, but she never really took her mother’s fairy tales at their word.

She probably should have.

(They were tucked into her boot and she took them on instinct because she didn’t know how to live any other way. No woman in her family ever had. She took them with her eyes closed and without any water to wash them down. They were small enough to hide, small enough to lose if she thought about it - or rather, forgot to think about it.

She never wondered why other women didn’t need them.

She forgot to consider the fact that she was back on Earth and things worked different down here.)

While in her holding cell, Abbie was allowed to visit Clarke every day to administer special vitamins to counteract a genetic deficiency.

Alone in a cell with only her thoughts and the Earth swirling in the distance, she finally had the chance to consider just how odd that was.

Mom, a genetic deficiency would have been weeded out generations ago on the Ark.

It’s just a vitamin, Clarke.

There are restrictions on everything up here, mom. Why would this one thing be any different?

I told you, your great-great-something grandmother brought enough on board to last the number of generations that she presumed would need them. It’s only to last us until we get back home.

Why even let us procreate, mom? Shouldn’t I be impossible?

Kids like the Blake girl are impossible. We are just ignored anomalies.

What she forgot was that on the Ark, one small pill a day was enough to keep her normal.

On Earth, it was a whole different ballgame.

She just never thought she’d ever be on Earth and once she was, all the stories her mother had ever told her disappeared into the black hole of fear she carried in her chest like a totem.

She smelled the deer before they all saw it.

It smelled of fresh, living sinew and meat and fur. She could practically feel the soft down of its coat under her fingers before it appeared in her vision.

Her direction had changed a while back, but no one noticed. She was prowling, stalking something. All thoughts of the supplies and the mission were overshadowed with a deep and feral need. When she finally saw the peaceful beast, a deep moan or growl got caught in her throat and she felt almost as though she would choke on it.

She turned to the Space Walker for a cue and spread her lips into a thin smile to match his bright one.

She didn’t need to look at the deer to know what it was doing, to feel it’s every movement on her skin, to taste the grass it ate in her mouth, wrapping around her tongue like a caress. What she needed was to focus on the person beside her, form her movements in a mirror image of his.

You are human. You are human. You are human, she chanted to herself as she let them lead her back on the path towards their goal, the forest around her seeming to chant along with her.

There was nothing else she could be, really.

Weren’t they all human?

Once, in the days when things were simple and her very life wasn’t on the line every moment, she heard her parents arguing.

All parents argue, she guesses.

All couples on the Ark argue.

It’s too small and too cramped of quarters not to notice.

There’s nowhere for the strain of marital bliss to go.

(Romance has been dead for generations anyway.
Romance will never be dead and Clarke guesses that’s why there’s so many extra-marital affairs in the end.

Dreams always wither and die in the light of day.
Reality will never disappoint you.)

This argument stuck in her mind, like a magnet to metal.

It was something ridiculous. Maybe about laundry or someone working too late. Something negligible. Something that shouldn’t have been a fight but was because sometimes the arguments you choose are the ones that mean the least so that you can say something worth meaning.

In the space between a sob and a screech her mother’s voice rang out loud and clear, You stopped seeing me as human since that night. Why won’t you just walk away?

Clarke spent the night with Boyd watching old films with his father and giggling because that’s what ten year olds do when their parents need a night to themselves. In the morning, their small quarters carried in them a strange musky scent and there were deep gashes on her father’s arms that he kept covered for a few weeks.

And her mother took two pills that morning with a wistful smile, her cheeks more rosy than normal and her limbs moved like liquid instead of her usual controlled, sharpness.

She felt herself drifting away from her mother after that, or maybe before, maybe always or maybe only recently.

There was a comfort in her father’s ease that was missing from her mother’s controlled motions.

He said - wistfully almost - that they were so much alike, his strong, clear-eyed women. (She was a woman to her father long before she was a girl and shortly after she was a baby. He didn’t believe in children. He believed in promise, in what could be, in acting as though the future was already upon him.)

You should tell her. His voice a whisper above her head as she slept, a plea, a wish, a request.

And then the soft touch of a thin finger brushing back a strand of her hair.

Not yet.

Fathers, in Clarke’s estimable opinion, were bright smiles and warm arms and a gentle ear.
Mothers, she decided at too young an age to change her mind, were secrets and control and hiding.

Remember to take your pills said the note wedged into her sock with a packet of small yellow pills.

So she did. At first.

No one could say she had ever been anything other than a good daughter.

No one could say that she had ever been anything other than good.

It smells different than I …

Different than you thought it would?

He was all swagger and freckles and smirks and bright eyes and he smelled as though he was home. (They all smelled out of place. Like canned air being let out to dry. The whole lot of them made her feel sick to her stomach and restless. Like she could run for days and days.) He smelled as though she could take his hand and run with him until the sun set and the stars came out and keep going.

His scent tasted more wild than the trees, more fragile than the flowers the girls were collecting in garlands about their heads.

Yeah, was all she said.

And it was too much.

Because with him near and her back against a tree, she forgot for a moment what she was entirely.

Control. Secrets. Hiding.

Like mother like daughter, I guess.



a/n: I can't believe I'm actually doing this. In hindsight, I probably should have just made this my heroinebang, but I'm a needy writer and am desperate for comments on this idea. 

fic: au, fic: 100, warrior women, fic happens here, 100: leadership, morally dubious princess, fic: ot3

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