Chapter Text
You would think that after being alive for over 2000 years and living in over 500 different places that, by this point, Clarke would be good at moving.
This assumption couldn’t be farther from the truth. Clarke has always been the most obnoxious type of transient, always leaving the most important tasks to the last minute. She has more belongings than any person should be allowed to have. On top of those two already terrible attributes, she has a knack for choosing to move on the hottest day of the year without knowing and always forgets at least one worthless but still very important object at her old place and stopped everything to go get it, even if it was at the most inopportune moment.
To be quite honest, she can’t fucking believe that Raven is helping her out this time.
“For fuck’s sake, Clarke, how many antique hairbrushes do you have?” Raven groans from her spot on the hardwood floor of the apartment that they now live in together as of noon today. They have finally gotten all of Clarke’s belongings to what is already Raven’s apartment from the storage unit they had been kept in while Clarke has been abroad. She flushes as Raven brandishes a positively medieval contraption from 1300’s France that would always make her scalp bleed whenever she used it.
“I like keeping souvenirs,” she offers as an excuse before snatching the hairbrush out of Raven’s hand. She has grown oddly protective of her belongings from her past lives, especially the ones where memory was beginning to no longer hold onto the finer details. Every once in a while, the sun hits her face in particular way and her heart sings and she’s taken back to another place, another time, Rome in 1597 or Jerusalem in 392 but these moments are becoming few and far between as she careens into her second millennium of being alive. These souvenirs, though painfully silly and hopelessly impractical in moments such as these when they became burdens rather than memories, afford her the memories that her mind can no longer hold.
Raven rolls her eyes but finds another hairbrush, this one from 1893, in a cardboard box marked “IMPORTANT! DO NOT THROW OUT,” and places it on Clarke’s nightstand. An uneasy silence stretches out between them and Clarke sucks in a breath because she knows what’s coming.
“So, are you gonna tell me why you really decided to move to DC or are we gonna keep pretending that you just so happened to find a job here?” Raven asks, an eyebrow raised and a sneaky smile on her lips. Clarke sighs, pulls a pair of shoes out from the bottom of a box before dropping them to the floor with an unceremonious thunk.
“I missed you.”
“Is that really what you’re going with? Clarke, if you missed me, you could’ve visited, instead of getting a job where I live and asking if you could move into my apartment. I mean, I know I’m fucking awesome but, us being apart has never been that big of a deal before. How about you try again and tell me the real reason this time?”
Clarke frowns, casting her eyes downward. Raven always had a habit of asking the exact question that she was avoiding answering for herself. She pulls another pair of shoes out of the box, a pair of lace-up boots from 19th century London, and makes a show of adjusting the laces. Raven, like always, sees right through her and snatches the boots out of her hands so Clarke no longer has a distraction from her old friend’s line of questioning.
“That’s the real reason. I missed you and I got burnt out on doing Doctors without Borders all the time. I needed a change of pace. Besides, we haven’t lived together in a while,” she says. Raven is definitely not buying this explanation but she sighs, knowing that trying to get the truth out of Clarke is a hopeless battle that she does not have the energy to fight right now, after spending the whole day moving in the summer’s sticky heat.
“Listen, you don’t have to tell me right now. I know you’ve probably been through some shit since the last time we saw each and that’s probably gonna take a while to process but I just want you to know that, when you’re ready to talk, I’m here for you.”
Raven puts a hand on her friend’s shoulder after she finishes speaking. Clarke nods and in that moment, she feels unspeakably thankful for Raven. She places her hand on the one that Raven has on her shoulder and forces a small smile but a smile nonetheless, a realer one than any that have passed across her lips in god knows how long.
“Thank you, Raven. For everything.”
“Don’t thank me yet. You’re the one who has to live with me. And I know it’s been a hundred years since the last time we lived together but I still haven’t learned how to do dishes.”
Clarke laughs and her heart fills with warmth. Perhaps, this life won’t be so bad after all.
Even though, in this life, she still hasn’t seen Bellamy in almost one hundred years.
*
She doesn’t like thinking about the last time she saw him.
Not about the way his lips twisted around her name or the desperation in his voice. She doesn’t like how he forced her to remember every moment that they had spent together and how he had been there for her, whenever she needed it the most.
She doesn’t like remembering how his lips felt against hers, how she knew it was their last kiss before it even started, how she knew there was no recovering from this and what they had done to each other.
Most of all, she doesn’t like acknowledging the fact that after nineteen hundred years spent together, side by the side, companions and life partners in every sense of the word, everything between them is ruined and it’s all her fault.
*
“Dr. Griffin, we need you in the emergency room to do rounds.”
The nurse’s voice cuts through Clarke’s reverie just at the most inopportune moment, the one where she just began to fixate upon what his face had looked like the first time they met. She rubs her eyes, trying to banish the image from her mind, before fixing the nurse, a lovely girl named Maya, with a forced smile. Already, she knows she is not exactly making the best impression at her new job.
Usually, Clarke is able to lose herself in her work. Hell, that’s the whole reason she had decided to go to medical school again in the first place. The change of scenery to Cambridge, Massachusetts and Harvard Med had at first afforded her the opportunity to lose herself, forget all the people she had been throughout the past millenniums and pretend that she was just Clarke Griffin, native of Connecticut who did her undergraduate coursework at Oxford (an alma mater that would create enough distance between her and her classmates without arising suspicion) and was eager to learn. It was hard, like it always was, to feign ignorance when her male classmates attempted to explain elementary anatomical concepts to her like she wasn’t over two thousand years old and hadn’t been through this whole “learning how to be a doctor” song and dance at least five times by now. No matter the annoyances, she at first was able to forget her past, become committed to a new group of friends, focus in on her speciality (emergency medicine because she decided she really wanted a challenge this go around), and even have a few romantic trysts that fizzled into nothing as soon as they started.
“Sorry, Nurse Vie. I’ll be there in a moment,” Clarke manages, after collecting herself. She rises to her feet and brushes the crumbs of her granola bar off of her chest. Not exactly her most dignified moment yet, but she has been at the hospital for over sixteen hours with no end in sight. Maya smiles good-naturedly, the cynicism in her eyes betraying she’s seen far worse than a crumb covered attending trying to make their way to the emergency room on no sleep. A quiet moment of understanding passes between the two women and, for a second, Clarke thinks this new job is one of the best ideas she’s had in a very long time.
That is, until she gets to the emergency room and sees Octavia fucking Blake for the first time in over a hundred years, standing in the middle of the emergency room with a very handsome, albeit very injured mortal man.
*
What happens next, Clarke is not exactly proud of. While, when she first saw Octavia, she intended to face the interaction head on, that feeling quickly dissipated as soon as she realized that while seeing Octavia was not as bad as seeing Bellamy, she was at least certain that Bellamy would not punch her in the face upon first sight.
And that is how she ended up hiding in the janitor’s closet.
“God, you’re such a fucking idiot,” Clarke mumbles to herself, pacing in the closet with what limited space she has. She has bumped into the mop and the mop bucket at least five times since she entered the closet but she knows that this situation is far preferable to the one waiting for her in the emergency room. Before escaping to the closet, she had grabbed one of her fellow attendings and begged them to trade rounds with her and they, thankfully, obliged, perhaps sensing Clarke’s desperation as her fingers dug into their shoulder.
So, she’s bought herself some time. At least enough to wait out Octavia and hopefully enough to wrap her mind about what has happened. She pulls her phone out of the pocket of her scrubs and quickly dials Raven’s number. It’s 2am but Raven is usually up at this hour anyway, slaving away at one of her personal coding projects.
She answers after the second ring.
“What’s up? Shouldn’t you be saving lives right now?”
“When were you going to tell me that Octavia lives in DC?”
Clarke hears Raven swear under her breath.
“I don’t know - when you told me why you decided to move here.”
Clarke groans, leaning against the damp wall of the janitor’s closet. The fumes from all the cleaning products messing with her head. “Raven, you’ve known me for over 600 years. I think you can figure out why I decided to move to DC,” she replies. Avoidance. Hiding. Running away from her problems so she never has a moment to actually process what has happened to her, what she has become. She lets herself slide down the wall until she’s sitting on the floor. She hears Raven let out a soft sound of sympathy and she so desperately wishes she was at home, with her friend, not in a fucking janitor’s closet and dealing with this bullshit all by herself.
“You guys still haven’t made up?”
“I haven’t seen him since.”
“You haven’t seen him since 1923? What the fuck, Clarke? That’s almost a hundred years.” The disbelief in Raven’s voice causes Clarke’s heart to clench with the knowledge that she’s fucked up, bad this time. Fifty years may have been excusable but a hundred? There’s no way that can be forgiven.
Raven sighs and Clarke can hear her rubbing her temples. She wonders if Raven’s ashamed of her. Worse, she wonders if this confirms all the terrible thoughts that Raven must have had about her throughout these years, when she created the chasm between the two of them that now seems impossible to cross.
“I’m sorry for saying that...I know that you two...it’s never as simple as it always seems to me, I guess.”
“It’s okay. I know it must be hard to be friends with someone who is an emotionless monster,” she manages, after a few painful moments, the self-loathing in her voice evident.
“...Clarke, don’t start that shit with me - it’s not true and you know it.”
She sighs. Her throat’s thick with the effort of holding in the storm that’s been brewing inside her ever since she arrived in Washington DC. Clarke pulls her knees to her chest.
“He lives here, doesn’t he?”
A beat. Then another. Clarke hears Raven shifting in her seat on the other line and her silence confirms what she has now realized is her worst nightmare.
“I’m sorry...I thought...I guess I just assumed that you knew. That him being here was the reason you wanted to move here. I didn’t know that you hadn’t spoken to him since the fucking early 1900’s,” Raven replies and there’s a thin veil over the annoyance, the frustration in her voice. Clarke tenses up. The last thing she needs right now is to get into a stupid fight with Raven but she feels it bristling inside her, the need to act out. She rises to her feet and begins pacing around the closet again, hitting the mop out of the way whenever it falls on her.
“Are you trying to say something, Raven?”
“I don’t know, maybe I’m trying to say that if you talked to me about your feelings more than once every century, I would have known not to tell you to move here, okay?”
While she wants to take offense to what Raven has said, to rail against it as false and hurtful, deep down, Clarke knows it’s the truth. She’s been a difficult person to know for the entirety of her existence and an even more difficult person to be friends with. Though her and Raven have been close for an inordinately expansive set of years, there have been many years of silence, of misunderstanding. The bridge between them had oftentimes been Bellamy, of all people. And now, without him in Clarke’s life, it is almost as though she is actively losing her ability to be companionable, to be anything other than a pillar of strength that can weather any storm, as long as it doesn’t involve talking about her emotions.
Suddenly, the weight of all the experiences she’s been avoiding, of all the secrets she’s been hiding from herself, falls itself upon Clarke’s shoulders. She finds herself slipping to the ground once more, this time far less gracefully, and the silence between her and Raven becomes sticky and uncomfortable.
She takes a deep breath. Clarke knows she has two choices and neither of them are great. She can either continue this conversation with Raven, in this fucking janitor’s closet where she’s hiding from Bellamy’s sister, or she can hang up the phone, find somewhere else to sleep, and probably kiss the last real relationship in her life goodbye.
“I’m sorry, Rae. I don’t blame you for thinking that. The reason I never told you about...what happened is because I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed and I’m pretty sure I ruined everything between him and I. And that’s my cross to bear. I’m realizing that now. But, I don’t want to ruin everything between the two of us just because I’m too prideful to admit that I probably should’ve let you know. And I apologize for that.” The words leave Clarke’s mouth in a stuttered, clumsy cadence but she manages it anyway. She notices her phone is sticky with tears and, belatedly, that she’s crying for the first time in what feels like ages. She lets out a soggy little laugh at the ridiculousness of this situation, crying, on the phone, with Raven, in a fucking janitor’s closet.
Raven, thankfully, doesn’t leave her hanging for long. “You crying, Griffin?”
Another laugh. Clarke smiles through her tears, wipes them away with the sleeve of her scrubs. “Yeah, in a janitor’s closet. I hid in here when I saw Octavia,” she replies and she hears Raven laugh, loud and full, before speaking again.
“Are you serious?”
“Unfortunately.”
Warmth fills Clarke’s chest, radiating to the her fingertips. The weight she carries, that often feels impossibly burdensome, lightens a touch, and she finds herself smiling.
“Listen, what time do you get off work?”
Clarke glances down at her watch. To her surprise, it’s already 3am, signifying the end of her shift. “I’m actually off now,” she replies, wiping the last of her tears from her face.
“Okay, stay in your closet, I’ll be there in 10 minutes and I’ll sneak you out of there. Octavia will probably be too distracted by her boyfriend anyway.”
“You’re the best, Raven.”
“And don’t you ever forget it.”
*
They don’t talk about everything. Not at first, anyway. Raven checks to make sure the coast is clear and then texts Clarke to meet her in the drop-off lane of the hospital. She extricates herself from the janitor’s closet, shuts the door quietly behind her and then takes off running for the exit. It all feels rather silly as soon as she gets to Raven’s car, throws the door open, and slides in like she’s in a low budget spy movie and the way Raven says “it’s go time,” as soon as Clarke clips her seatbelt on is enough to make her laugh at least half of the way home.
Raven insists on picking up drive-thru hamburgers and french fries on the way home. “It can’t kill us, stupid,” she retorts when Clarke says that they should pick a healthier choice and she cannot help but giggle in response before asking her old friend to order her two cartons of fries instead of one.
When they reach their home, they set up on the floor of the living room. It’s 4am but neither of them particularly care. Clarke doesn’t have work until 6pm and Raven works from home a lot of the time. Once they both have poured their preferred amount of ketchup and hot sauce onto their plates, they settle into a comfortable silence.
Only after they both have finished their first order of fries and have started working on their second, does Raven ask her the question that Clarke has known is coming since their phone conversation ended. “So, do you want to talk about it now?”
She sighs. It’s a question she truly does not know the answer to. While she would like to think crying and emoting a couple of hours ago would have opened the floodgates to some deep and unfathomable truth about herself and the path her life has taken, no such insight sits on the tip of her tongue. She’s lost. The shock of knowing that Bellamy, the albatross she has been carrying about her neck for what feels like the entirety of her existence, is here, where she is, has not hit her in the way she’s expected. Instead of a sharp blow to the chest, like she expected, it feels like a compound fracture, splintering her body in the most quiet, most wide reaching of ways. She cannot put the exact words to it, only knowing that if she sees him in person, she may fall apart the moment their eyes meet. It’s an unholy sensation, one that makes her want to run.
And she cannot say that she hasn’t been thinking about it ever since she saw Octavia. Running. This life she has built here is no more permanent than any of the others she has had. She could go abroad again, perhaps to Germany where she bought a home in the 1980’s. Or, she could find one of the hideouts where she and Bellamy had hidden gold sometime during the 15th century and buy herself a remote island where no one from her old lives, not Raven, not Bellamy, not Octavia, not even Wells, would be able to find her.
Or, she could learn to live some form of life here. In his shadow, in constant fear of running into him and seeing for herself the ire he holds for her and the hatred she rightly deserves.
“I have his number, if you want it,” Raven offers, finally, her words startling Clarke out of her reverie. She shakes her head immediately.
“Why do you have his number?”
Raven laughs, almost cruelly but not quite. “Clarke…Bellamy’s my friend too.”
It’s hard to miss the innuendo in Raven’s words, hard to not let it pierce Clarke’s already tender heart. There were times when Raven and Bellamy had gone to bed together. It was often when Clarke wasn’t around or, more likely, when she was in one of her moods. Hell, there was even a handful of times when she and Raven had been lovers. Such things happened when time stretched out infinitely. She nods, schooling her expression to not betray the hurt she may feel (though, she can barely even admit it to herself).
“No, I don’t think I want his number. I think…I think I’m just gonna pretend this didn’t happen. That I didn’t see Octavia. Pretend he isn’t here. And, if I see him one day, I’ll figure out what to do then. But, for now, I just want to focus on my job. And having a good time with you.”
Raven’s eyes widen a little at Clarke’s words and Clarke frowns at her friend’s incredulous expression. However, before she can say anything, ask Raven what’s bothering her, her thoughts are interrupted by Raven’s words: “fine, but, if you ever change your mind, you can ask me for it whenever you want.”
Clarke nods. And she promises herself that she will never ask Raven and she will try to never think about Bellamy Blake ever again.
*
Truth be told, Clarke barely remembers what her life was like as a mortal, apart from the fact that it was painful.
Painful in the way that was unique to mortals and the sorry plight of their kind: that death was inevitable and unpredictable. She knows she had a mother, a stern woman whose mouth was always in a firm line but had such kindness in her eyes, and a father whose best intentions led to his demise (and almost hers as well). Beyond that, the small details are always slipping away from her, even how she became immortal to begin with.
If you ask Clarke today how she was blessed (or, alternatively, cursed) with her eternal life, she will say it had something to do with her mother’s desperation and the gods’ twisted of sense of humor.
She had been sentenced to death (she remembers that much, at least). The crime was not hers but in many ways was, the way in which a parent’s guilt spreads to their children. Her father was a willful man from an ancient, now lost tribe originating in Gaul, who refused to bow down to the Roman Empire. Her mother had accidentally let it slip to a Roman soldier. Her father, along with all of the tribes leadership, was slaughtered. Clarke escaped the first round, hidden in the cellar by her mother, but when the soldiers came again, there was no reprieve. Despite being only 17 years of age, she was sentenced to die.
Her mother was overcome with guilt, the type of guilt that drives the otherwise sane to do mad things. She was the tribe’s healer, the one closest to their magic. Using blood magic from a time forbidden and forgotten, she gave her own life so Clarke had a chance of surviving certain death.
There is one clear memory Clarke has of this life, the one before everything. She remembers a Roman soldier holding an axe to her neck. He raised up his arms and brought it down. For a moment, her consciousness ebbed away and she considered that, perhaps, her mother’s magic didn’t work after all and this was her end. However, as quickly as she left her body, she came back, to the sound of the soldier screaming as her neck fused itself back together.
It was only five years later, when people in the village she was inhabiting tried to kill her for being a witch, that she realized her mother’s magic had been more successful than she had intended.
Some days, Clarke hates what her life has become. She hates endless mornings, the type of purposelessness that comes from knowing there’s no end, no conclusions to any story. She’s tried to kill herself more times than she can count, only to wake up with her pulse still beating and her mind still racing because she still doesn’t know what’s the point of all this, staring down the barrel of another thousand years on this planet with no end in sight.
Other days, one hundred years ago, she remembers that she used to see a purpose in all of this. She used to feel like there was meaning. It was still intangible then, an ethereal cloud that she never felt as though she could capture in words or actions or thought.
But, deep down, she always thought it had something to do with Bellamy Blake and the way he made the world seem like something worth participating in.