okteiviakom | The Cape Rouge, Port of Fandom, Way Early Monday Morning

Entry tags:

The Cape Rouge, Port of Fandom, Way Early Monday Morning

It would have been an overstatement to say Octavia had been sleeping well over the last couple of weeks. Although she slept a lot, her sleep had tended to be fitful, restless. But, so far, whenever she actually managed sleep, it had been of the exhausted, dreamless kind.

As Sunday turned into Monday, her luck on that front finally ran out.

-----

She's back in the gorge. It stretches on for miles, impossibly long, out into the horizon and even beyond. She knows this even though she can't see it.

She's not alone.

She's never alone. The bodies are strewn all across the dusty floor of the gorge. She can see some of them piled up on top of each other. Some of them twitch and convulse in unnatural ways.

Others are perfectly still, and she's not sure which is worse.

Octavia.

Someone speaks her name, right beside her. She turns her head, expecting Bellamy, because it's always Bellamy. Right? But it's not.

It's Ilian, laying on the ground with her.

Around his neck, not on a black leather cord but on a delicate chain, hangs her dove. Above it, a round pendant with a butterfly on it. And above that, his smile. Warm, faintly amused, as if she's been tilling the soil all wrong again.

And then he moves to get up, and panic fills her lungs so tight she can't even tell him not to do it, and his smile falls away.

Gon Blodreina.

She can't move. And as Ilian gets up, she can see the arrow sticking out of his neck, sees her knife stuck in his belly, sees how ashy his face is. Sees the bullet strike his temple, sees the tiny spray of blood.

Sees him drop down next to her, eyes glassy and staring right through her.

She screams his name.

-----

It wasn't a scream, out in the real world. Octavia had spent too long under everyone's constant attention to let her guard slip that far down even as she slept. It was muffled, more like a whimpery mumble.

"Ilian, no --"

And she was fidgeting. Still felt like she couldn't move.

[ooc: For that guy in the bed. Content warning for some gore under the cut. ETA: Extra content warning for the thread for vague suicidal ideation, talk of past NPC deaths and probably various other sensitive subjects.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

Duke lost track of the actual verses of his song pretty much immediately, just singing whatever words of it he happened to remember.

"There's that one particular harbour
Sheltered from the wind
Where the children play on the shore each day
And all are safe within."

He was within arm's reach now, but kept his hands in his pockets, his stance as casual as he could make it. Trying so hard to be as easy and uncomplicated a presence for her as anyone could be.

Maybe that should have included shutting up. But he talked when he was nervous or uncomfortable. Put on a show. Always had to be the entertainer.

Octavia wished he'd dared to touch her, instead of... whatever this was. Singing at her until she calmed down?

She didn't turn around to face him.

"You want to know who Ilian was?" she asked, much louder than his voice. "He's someone who thought I could be better than I was. There's always someone like that, and they are always wrong."

He'd totally start doing that if she just told him.

He stopped singing as soon as she started talking.

"Why did he think you needed to be better?"

And telling him was a weakness Octavia didn't know how to handle.

So clearly acting the way she was acting now was the superior choice.

"Because I was an assassin."

Because she'd been cold and aloof and he'd seen through her.

Oh.

"I'm guessing a damn good one," he said, giving her another of those tiny smiles.

At some point, she'd see through those. And the way they tended to show up when he really wasn't sure how best to respond.

Octavia hadn't even been looking at him.

But she could still hear it in his voice, and she finally turned to face him. "Aren't you upset?"

That came out like a snap. Aggressive, almost like a challenge.

The smile fell away. Well, at least that aggression gave him something to work with.

"Yes, Tavi. I'm upset all the time. But I know you, if you were an assassin it was because you had to be. Honestly, it doesn't sound like the Ground gave you many choices in anything!"

"It didn't," Octavia ground out. He was absolutely right about that. "Wanna know how Ilian died? He was trying to help me, and someone who wasn't even a champion put an arrow through his neck."

Maybe this was the only way she could even talk about him. With anger.

"And I had to finish the job, or he would've bled out slowly."

Duke closed his eyes, turning his head slightly as though he'd been struck.

"I'm sorry," he said.

There wasn't really anything else to say to something like that.

Seeing that squeezed at Octavia's heart, and yet it was still better than seeing that smile from before.

She should've stopped. She didn't.

"And this was after I'd spent about a week on his stupid farm, trying to be the kind of person he thought I could turn into. Tending to his stupid sheep and his stupid plants and listening to him talk about things that just made me think about you."

Was that a stab of absolutely pointless jealousy of a dead man?

Duke wasn’t proud.

“You had a week of peace,” he said, more to himself than to her. “Just — just a week.”

"A week of peace on a planet we knew was about to die."

Again.

And then she’d been forced to kill him.

Duke didn’t say it, not wanting to be accused of jumping ahead again.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. Uselessly.

Fuck, and he’d tried to make this better by singing?

At some point, he was going to realize there simply was no making this better.

"And then I left him, because I couldn't be what he wanted me to be, and there was supposed to be a war happening, for the bunker." Octavia doubted she needed to explain why a war had called to her more than the farm. And she didn't want to explain the particulars of her leaving.

Because she didn't want to think about Ilian's stunned face when he'd found her with three mangled corpses at her feet.

"But when I got to Polis, there wasn't a war. Instead, there was the conclave. And Ilian, who'd said there was no point in fighting at the end of the world, turned up to represent Trishanakru."

Duke swallowed, but didn't speak. He just stood, shoulders faintly hunched, and listened.

Octavia's voice was getting flatter. "He wanted to make an alliance, and I told him to go float himself. But he must've shadowed me anyway, 'cause he showed up when I got cornered by three other champions. We killed them, and then... You know the rest."

Arrow, mercy-killing.

"That's why I don't have the dove anymore. I left it with him."

"I'm sorry," Duke said again. "That you lost him. That you had to kill him. I -- I can't even imagine."

Well. He'd eventually learn about what mercy killing felt like, anyway.

And Octavia had refused to be allies exactly because, if they'd been successful taking out all the others, that would've meant having to kill him at the end.

And he'd ended up asking her to do it anyway.

"Trishanakru, they believed in reincarnation," she said instead of any of that. "Just like you."

"So . . . maybe you'll meet again someday."

It wasn't much of a comfort, he knew.

Yeah.

Octavia's voice was mild again, now. "That thinking didn't even work for me when it was about you."

"Yeah." Duke hung his head and wrapped his hands around the back of his neck. "Yeah, it didn't help me a lot, either."

Even when he'd been saying it into her voicemail.

Octavia finally stepped closer to him.

Her anger had fizzled out, and now she was just... sort of empty.

"I'm not the same person I was when I left."

Duke let out a faintly choked laugh. “I’ve noticed.”

"I'm sorry I'm not what you wanted to get back."

She didn't even mean that as a self-pitying thing. Just -- a fact. She was well aware they'd all expected the 21-year-old who'd been a little battered, sure, but still able to occasionally smile and tease and even amuse them sometimes.

And instead they had her.

That got a shaky sigh. "I'm not going to pretend I don't miss who you used to be," he said. "I do. All the time. But I'd rather have you than not. We just -- need to relearn some things. That's all."

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject