You and Me

Chapter 5

The first morning, Clarke thought she had her days wrong. Then, it was the weekend guards that came to escort her to the showers. So, she wasn't wrong, it was the weekend. Why hadn't Bellamy knocked on her door?

At lunch, when the tray slot opened, she smacked the door, but received no reply.

"Hey!" She shoved the tray back through, making it fall on the floor.

The guard cursed. It wasn't him.

"Who are you?" Clarke shouted, but just like during the week, the guard refused to talk to her.

The next day, when the two guards came to take her to the showers, she stayed put, pushed them off. She couldn't risk asking where he was but could make their lives difficult until he was transferred back. They left her instead of forcing her to shower.

The next weekend was the same.

Clarke didn't know what to think. Had he asked to be transferred? Had Octavia been found, and Bellamy floated? Locked in a cell, Clarke was left to draw up every possible explanation. But the outcome was always the same. Bellamy was gone and Clarke remained in solitary.

Slowly, Clarke lost sense of the outside world. Every day, she still woke up and did her exercises, going until she was brought to the showers. She ate her grey food and spent the time before bed either drawing or staring at Octavia's hand writing. She'd given up trying to hide her drawings, moving to cover as much wall space as possible. Conserving the three pencils she had was hard, but she made it work.

Her seventeenth birthday passed without celebration, and she began counting down her last year of life. Outside her tiny window, the darkness of space waited.

One day, she felt the beating of steps near her door. She'd thought she'd heard them before, but now, while she was leaning against the door doing wall sits, she was sure those were steps.

"Hey!" Clarke banged on the slit. "Hey! What's going on?" Her door got a loud bang, as someone tried to quiet her, but Clarke kept pulling on the slit to be heard. "Who's out there! Hey!" Clarke banged on her door, until suddenly it swung open and a guard came in, his electric baton on and raised so she had to stumble backwards to avoid being hit.

"Quiet!"

Clarke tried to look behind him, spotting other prisoners walking down the hallway, a line of them turning the corner, each one peering into her cell at the only solitary prisoner.

"I want to know what's happening."

"I'm sure you want a lot of things, but you're staying in here."

"What are you doing to them? They can't all be getting floated right now!"

The guard looked at Clarke as though she was an idiot, "it's just Earth skills class." Clarke's eye widened. Earth skills?

Before she could think more on why the prisoners were being taught at all, a hand fell on the guard's shoulder. "Prisoner 319 is not to be interacted with, Private."

"Sorry, Chancellor. She was yelling and distracting the other delinquents. I came in to quiet her."

Clarke froze as she laid eyes on the man that murdered her father for the first time. Chancellor Jaha sent the guard away, then turned to look at Clarke, meeting her glare with his ever-passive stance.

"You're going to send the prisoners to Earth, see if it is survivable, aren't you? Or at least, send us as a ruse to save some more oxygen." Jaha didn't reply, just lazily looked around the room at her drawings. His eyes lingered on the Blake siblings, so Clarke distracted him. "I need to be in that class too."