Bellarke One Shots Book 2

90) Explain The Infinite

Archive of our own
By: prosciutto
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Her mark materializes when she's ten- soft and hazy around the edges, a bloated full moon- and she thinks it's a bruise.

"Does it hurt?" Her mother asks, pressing gently against her hip, fingers cool against her heated skin. Clarke shakes her head, fidgets when her mother continues probing at it; scraping her nail against the edges, dabbing at it with her pointer finger.

Her father tells her a story that night, of hubris and of greed, of greek gods and myth. She listens, wide-eyed, enraptured by his words, of the possibility of a soul mate.

"Are you mommy's soul mate?" she asks as he cards his fingers through her hair, rubs soothing circles around her temples to lull her to sleep.

"I choose to be," he says, easy, and that's that.

Wells tell her that it's a tattoo of sorts- permanent, binding- and also, rare. He says it with a trace of envy in his eyes, his palm resting against his own hip absentmindedly, fingers searching skin.

He's wrong, but she doesn't tell him that. The mark changes along with her, lines sharp and sweeping when she turns fourteen, pitch black when she's sixteen. A living, growing being- just like her- and if she listens close enough, hand pressed against her hip, she swears she can hear its heartbeat.

The mark settles when she's seventeen, a full moon, a perfect circle, dark and defined. There's a sense of urgency now- eagerness and hunger as she kisses up throats and rucks up shirts- always followed by disappointment and yearning.

She's seventeen when the ark starts to fail, choking on its final breath. Seventeen when her father dies, seventeen when she's locked up in a cold, white box, four walls and no windows.

It turns out that there's nothing much to do when you're awaiting a death sentence, so Clarke mourns instead. She mourns for her father, for everyone else on the ark, for the soul mate whom she never got to meet. She draws familiar faces on the walls and when there is no one left, she draws the fleeting faces through the window, blurred and warped through a sheet of glass.

Her mother visits her when she is eighteen, tells her that she's not dying.

"You're safe," she whispers fiercely against her neck, smoothing her hair away from her face, "you're going to the ground instead. All one hundred of you."

"I'm safe," she parrots, ever the dutiful daughter.

But as they strap her into the dropship, the engine grinding and whirring under her, screams rising in pitch as they plummet through space, she can't help but think, it's still a death sentence anyway.

The impact doesn't kill her, but it rattles her teeth, slams against her spine, and she keeps her hands clenched into fists, waiting for the infrastructure to fall apart.

Not a bad way to go, she thinks dryly, as the dropship screeches across earth, the sound jarring and disruptive, smashed to death upon impact, crushed by fiery debris.

They come to a halting stop, the metal walls groaning loudly in protest, Clarke's fingers still curled over the thick strap of her seatbelt.

"Listen." A boy says, shaking dust out of his hair, "No machine hum." There's a murmured assent in response before everyone breaks into uneasy muttering, fidgeting in their seats.

A fine layer of dust has settled over her clothes, her hair. She blinks, takes a slow, ragged breath. The air still tastes stale, like atmosphere and the ark. The lights above are a flickering strobe light, sporadic flashes of blood and bodies. Her eyes settle on a jagged metal pipe, one end still slick with blood, dust particles floating lazily.