okteiviakom: ([neu] hope)
Guess there were some pretty obvious perks to Duke and Lucifer's newly-constructed pool in the basement of the mansion. Like the option of a quiet, private evening swim, which was exactly what Octavia had just indulged in.

What had then drawn her up onto the top floor of the house was unclear, but what had drawn her out onto the balcony was much easier to pinpoint: the waxing crescent moon, bright in the sky. Almost painfully obvious for her, for natshana, as much as she'd tried to put a little bit of distance between herself and... all of that.

It didn't feel much like distance at all, right now. Everything with her just kept coming back to objects in the sky, didn't it? This planet. The Ark. Eligius. Natshana, skaifaya -- en deimeika. Octavia watched the sickle-shape in the sky, and gave a little sigh, like something in her chest, her shoulders, was deflating.

A thought almost flitted through her head without anything actionable catching onto it. Almost. It was a song, something she'd heard recently, fed to her by whatever algorithm took over once whatever she'd been listening to before it had run out. Something she hadn't even let play all the way through, the first time around.

As she got her phone out, she wondered whether she was even going to find it.

She did.

She pressed play, and let it play quietly out into the darkness of the evening.

Yellow sun is shining in the afternoon; I'd really like to tell you, but I feel it's too soon...

[ooc: Open, SP likely. Also yes I am magicking enough clear sky for her to see what I've been looking at all evening, shush.]
okteiviakom: ([spec] downtime)
"I think my spring is coming, Octavia. And I can't wait to see what it's like."

There had been no surprise in how hard it had been to say goodbye. Ilian had been impossibly calm and steady, and Octavia had just done her best to keep it together. Be brave, like he'd wanted her to be. Nou fir wamplei in, em bilaik stoda kom nes soujon noumou. Easy for him to say when he'd already done it, when she was the one left to mourn him all over again.

(That last glimmer of someone seeing something human in her before the bunker, The Dark Year, the valley. The last time in six years before the multiverse saw fit to yank whatever had been left of her back to Fandom, to put herself back together again.)

"If you want to honor me, maybe you should plant something. Grow something."

How was she supposed to do that, Ilian?

Everything hurt again.

And Octavia was finding it very hard to even get out of bed. In fact, she hadn't, yet. Just kept laying there, either staring at the ceiling or the line of already slightly smudged dots along the inside of her forearm. Ilian had drawn them with a marker, explaining to her about the tattoos of his clan. Just another thing she'd never had time to learn before.

She knew this had all been a gift.

But right now it was a little hard to ignore how much it also felt like having been stabbed in the gut again.

[ooc: Open for thems that live here, should they so wish.]
okteiviakom: ([neu] hope)
Octavia had seriously considered skipping therapy today. Between the way her arms ached from overdue sword practice, the pollen, and the clusterfuck of yesterday morning, it had been hard to find the motivation to get ready, take the portal, and go.

But it was hard every week.

So she'd done it, even though she felt like she had nothing to say this week. Or about this week. And last week was old news, now. (Any success she'd had there had been overwritten, wiped away.) So of course those things were what Dr. Baker zeroed in on practically as soon as she was through the office door.

Well-timed therapy under here. )

Afterwards, Octavia found a local swim center. She tried, for a while, to get in some actual swimming practice, cobbled together from what she'd looked up online and what she'd previously eavesdropped in the pool, but her arms protested too much. So she just floated. A lot. And while she floated, she thought about the things she'd gone over with Dr. Baker, things they'd pick up again on Friday morning, because she was now officially up to two sessions per week.

Compromising. Learning to pause before reacting. Learning to open her damn mouth when it mattered (her words, not her therapist's).

The stupid homework assignment she'd been given.

Her head felt too loud in a way that even the strange muted everything of having her ears underwater couldn't fix. She almost, almost longed to be back on the island already. The pollen hadn't entirely had time to leave her system yet, but she knew the first lungful back on Fandom would at least shift some of her focus to other kinds of noisy thoughts.

But for now... She was floating.

[ooc: Open for calls and texts, post-float.]
okteiviakom: ([spec] downtime)
Octavia had left for the mainland pretty early, much earlier than had really been necessary for her appointment. Had returned pretty late, too. She'd spent most of her day after therapy in Baltimore, first visiting the swim center again, then just... walking, with no real destination. She'd visited some shops, bought lunch.

Bought a pair of earbuds on a whim for her phone.

Immediately regretted it after it turned out she couldn't stand to walk around feeling like someone could sneak up on her.

And then, as the sun was setting, she'd finally come back to the island. Maybe a little more settled, maybe a little more understanding of the thing Duke had said yesterday to set her off. A lot drained. She'd gone to the Rouge first, but had found it empty. (Not that that was surprising: she knew what day this was.) She'd gone back and forth on staying, for a while, to wait for them, but ultimately decided not to.

It just felt like too much. With everything.

And the Samsara was small and quiet and manageable. Nothing but her, and her thoughts, stretched out on her bed, alone. Her phone on her chest, playing a song.

Over and over and over again.

(And no, she didn't know that there was a text still hanging in the ether, trying to get through.)

[ooc: Open, if you dare.]
okteiviakom: ([neg] crushing)
Octavia had been holding it together. All through yesterday, she'd been hanging tight to the feeling of relief that Duke was no longer at the mercy of a stupid rock's whims affecting his emotions. But she hadn't relaxed fully into it. Hadn't allowed herself to, because the past - weekend? Month? However long was weighing on her, and moment by moment she'd felt more and more like a dam was about to break. Like it was just a matter of time.

She'd held on for as long as she could. But she'd finally left the Rouge after breakfast this morning.

And Octavia was no longer holding it together.

At all.

Ridiculously enough, it was the envelope that did it, that started her off. The one with the paperwork from Dr. Baker's office, from what felt like a year ago because this past month seemed to have gone on forever. She caught sight of it on the little table on her boat, and just --

Crumbled onto the floor, to finally cry for everything she'd been holding back.

[ooc: Primarily establishy but can be open, sure.]
okteiviakom: ([neg] worried about you)
Duke was out for his class thing. Octavia wasn't sure for how long, but she was taking a chance, and so she sat at the table in the galley with two things in front of her. One, the phone Duke had given her after she'd shown up. Two, the locket Niylah had made her in the bunker. She'd finally opened it. Taken out the SIM card, and carefully, almost hesitantly put it in the phone.

She was honestly surprised to find it still worked. As soon as she turned the phone on, the notifications poured in. Texts, voicemails, missed calls. Almost all of them from Duke.

For a moment, Octavia just stared at them. And considered just deleting them all without looking.

But when had she last made a sensible choice like that? So instead, she went through the texts, from the selfies with goats through the increasingly worried questions, all the way down to just a picture of the ocean meeting the sky, with no caption, no words attached. She checked the date. A day, two days before she'd come back.

Then she moved on to the voicemails. "You missed lunch. You're not at the flower shop." The texts hadn't been easy, but at least they were short, quick to get through - a little more distant than the voicemails. They were his voice but not his voice.

(And then there was a voicemail that wasn't from Duke -- "So if you don't mind, I think it's time to come out of hiding." -- and that was its own kind of tangled emotion.)

"What's the point of anything if you can just go away? Fuck!" The texts hadn't had the sounds of glass breaking. None of Duke's shaky breaths. "I was and am very fucked up, and people need to stop asking me how I'm doing before I start stabbing them with your sword." She wanted to stop listening. But she also didn't want to miss even a second. All those years of wanting to talk to him, and he'd been talking to her, and his voice was -- "It's okay, you know. If you come back broken."

She wanted to stop listening.

She didn't. There was just one more voicemail left.

"Someday, we'll both be butterflies. And then we'll both be sharks. And then something else we haven't even dreamed of yet, but -- we'll find each other."

She'd just... sit here and let that last one loop a few times.

(Too many times.)

[ooc: Open, but angsty. Duh.]
okteiviakom: ([spec] sit with me feat. jasper)
Days turned into weeks.

Lincoln kept hovering and giving Octavia space in equal measure. Not that he had a choice: the commander's kill order (given for siding with Skaikru, for siding with her) on him still stood. When she left Arkadia, it wasn't safe for him to follow.

Octavia took Helios out past Arkadia's walls as often as she could. Her horse didn't ask questions she couldn't answer, and had no expectations she couldn't meet. Didn't act like she didn't belong or like there was something wrong about her. He'd whinnied when he'd first seen her again, and pushed his head against her hands, and that was that. He was easy, in a way people weren't.

(Helios also couldn't tell anyone how often their trips together took them back to where she and Bellamy had been dropped off by the multiverse.)

She continued not to feel much about anything.

But then there was Jasper. )

[ooc: NFB, NFI, OOC okay! Inspired by and partly lifted from The 100 S3 eps 1 and 2.]

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Octavia Blake

April 2025

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