first one who touches the ground loses

( The next morning, they marched on Shallow Valley again. )

And then Octavia opened her eyes again, and didn't even notice the tear roll the rest of the way into her hairline. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness, but then she saw them, treetops against the night sky, nothing but moonlight touching them.

She was laying on the forest floor.

This was a familiar dream. Countless nights in the bunker, she'd ended up in the woods. Either filled with shadows that seemed to move and to stalk, or - when she was lucky - filled with calm and quiet and no one and nothing else for miles.

She felt no danger here. Nothing moved in the shadows as she got up from the undergrowth. She didn't notice the things under her bare feet, crunching and scraping and pushing between her toes. Nothing could hurt her here, after all. She was sure of it.

And so she began walking.

And she walked and she walked.

And eventually she came to the edge of the forest, and wasn't at all surprised to see the castle. She'd seen it many times over the years, in her dreams, looming in the background of everything else.

She kept walking. Past the castle, towards the gates. Onto the cobblestone streets.

Down to the docks.

To the ship.

It wasn't always there when she came down here. Sometimes she couldn't even find the docks, but this time she had, and it was. She stood still for a moment, just looking at it, stretched out in its slip.

Then, she walked across the gangplank, and stepped aboard.

[ooc: For one. NFB for distance first, and then for timing. Things under the cut taken from The 100 S5 episode 13, and THUS CONCLUDES THE PLOT! \o/]

Octavia woke up to someone gently nudging her shoulder. It was Jackson, the closest thing they'd had to a doctor since Abby had gone with Diyoza. Behind him, Indra. Octavia had no idea how long she'd been out of it, but it had been long enough for them to have turned her chambers into her own personal sick ward.

She told Indra her brother had poisoned her.

Jackson, shocked, told Indra to arrest Bellamy.

And Indra told them she couldn't do that.

( And then, with Octavia able to do nothing but watch from the bed, Indra threw a knife. )

[ooc: NFB, NFI. Taken from The 100 S5 episodes 9-10. CONTENT WARNING for suicidal ideation and self-harm.]

Octavia did what she did best: prepared to attack. She took a battalion to march to Shallow Valley. Bellamy and Clarke came with them, for reasons Octavia didn't ask about nor care to hear. It would be a six-day journey across the dry seabed, chancing sandstorms. They wouldn't have been able to carry rations for the longer routes.

And, anyway. The sooner they secured the valley for themselves, the better.

( But of course it wasn't that easy. )

[ooc: NFB, NFI. Taken from The 100 S5 episodes 5-6. Content warning for body horror.]

Octavia was exhausted.

She was sitting outside the bunker door with Indra. The closed bunker door, the locked bunker door. Skaikru had betrayed them all. Led by Clarke and Jaha, they'd locked themselves in the bunker while the conclave was still going on.

Bellamy was down there with them. She'd spoken to him over the walkies, told him she'd won, that she'd announced they'd share the bunker. He hadn't gone down there willingly: they'd grabbed him off the street and dragged him down. And now he and Abby were their best hope at getting the damn door open again. The black rain was keeping the clans in their safe zones around Polis for now, while Kane and Gaia and the Flamekeeper scouts were stalling everyone who'd been in the tower during the conclave.

It was right as the clans were coming in, right as Octavia was sure they'd have to face the music, that the door finally opened.

She hadn't hugged Bellamy as tightly since before they'd left Fandom.

(But when he said, "I love you so much," she still said nothing.)

( The next twenty four hours were a blur. )

[ooc: NFB, NFI, thus concludes The 100 S4, with this post taken from episodes 11-13. Next up, THE REAL FUN BEGINS.]

Wasn't really a war Octavia found in Polis. It was a conclave, like the ones they used to use for choosing a new commander. One warrior per clan, in a fight to the death. No guns. The clan whose champion was the last person standing would take the fallout shelter, a bunker underneath Polis, built by a doomsday cult before the first Praimfaya. Other clans would perish.

The timeline of the oncoming apocalypse had shifted. They didn't have months left, they had days. And Skaikru had no fighters trained in hand-to-hand combat, no champion with a fraction of a chance of winning against the best of the other clans.

Enter Octavia.

( The Flamekeepers were presiding over this, the final conclave. )

[ooc: NFB, NFI. Taken from The 100 S4 episode 10. Part 1 of 2. Surprisingly no violence in this one!]

In the end, the key to coming up with a new plan was that they ran into Roan, the king of Azgeda, on their way to Arkadia. Or, really, it turned out he'd been tracking Clarke for a while in the hopes of securing the Flame for his people.

They dragged him back to Arkadia with them. Convinced him to help, because now that Polis had fallen to ALIE, they needed him to get into the city and capture the false commander, Ontari, from the middle of thousands of people whose minds were linked.

They left Jasper, Harper, Raven and Monty behind to do the kind of computer stuff Octavia wouldn't even pretend to understand. The rest of them went to Polis, and split up: Roan took Clarke in through the main gate, pretending he'd taken her as his prisoner, while the rest of them snuck in to one of the buildings overlooking the square in the middle of Polis, right by the tower where the commanders lived.

( The whole city was creepy. )

[ooc: NFB, NFI, etc. Taken from The 100 S3 episodes 15 and 16, plus a little bit at the end from S4 episode 1! Content warning for violence and cold-blooded murder of an NPC.]

Indra wasn't there in the cave anymore when they reached the hideout, and Octavia barely noticed. She certainly wasn't surprised - everything was falling apart. Why wouldn't Indra leave, too?

( But Bellamy was still there. )

[ooc: NFB, NFI, OOC all good. Taken with much summarizing from The 100 episodes 10-12. Content warning for violence.]

Octavia had far too much time to think, in the woods.

She thought about Lincoln, detained in Arkadia. About how she'd tried to get him to leave before, to try and go back to Indra and the rest of Trikru, but he'd been adamant about staying, about leading by example in trying to show they could all live peacefully together. But he was wrong about that, wasn't he? And now he was paying for it.

She thought about Bellamy and what he was doing and how she could barely believe he was doing it. But maybe she should've seen it coming. She'd forgotten over their time in Fandom how much shorter a time he'd spent on the Ground than she had. They'd barely made contact with grounders when he'd been taken, and so they were strangers to him. But that didn't explain siding with Pike, it didn't explain what they'd done.

And she thought about everyone back in Fandom. It had been, what? A month and a half, almost two since she'd disappeared. What did that mean for Fandom? She'd been on the island for almost three years and only a handful of months had passed on the Ground. Did that time difference still hold true? Maybe it had already been a year since she'd vanished.

Maybe everyone had already moved on.

(Maybe Lucifer had someone else to look out of place and surly at his club, maybe Shunsui had someone else coming by for grocery store sake, maybe Duke had someone else --)

She didn't want to think about it anymore.

( She wanted to go back to Indra )

[ooc: NFB, NFI, you know the rest. Summarized from The 100 s3 episode 6.]

Octavia had only the vaguest recollection of how she and Bellamy had made it to Arkadia from the woods.

But she was painfully aware of how every day since then, she had woken up wishing she would open her eyes and find everything back how it was supposed to be. That she'd be home and that this had all been yet another blip in the island's endless array of weirdness that she and Duke could talk about over drinks.

But every morning, she was here.

And Duke was a hundred years into the past.

( It shouldn't have been a surprise that Bellamy was taking to being back on the Ground far quicker than Octavia. )

[ooc: NFB, NFI, OOC okay! Establishing things before getting started on actual plot, la la la.]

Octavia didn't have a lot of love for Thanksgiving. It reminded her of Unity Day, up on the Ark, and Unity Day came with too much baggage to be a good association to have with anything.

But Octavia did like food. And so after her handwavy half-day shift at Covent Garden, she'd ended up getting ingredients to bake something. Specifically, pecan pie, because it supposedly went with this holiday but more importantly, it was something she knew she liked. At least when made by someone with actual skill and experience with baking things. And she... had neither of those.

What she did have were a pre-made pie shell along with everything she was supposed to put on it, as well as a restless feeling she desperately needed to shake, brought on by Duke's voicemail from yesterday as well as some severe indecision on whether she should check up on Larceny at the hotel.

And so, baking.

She made kind of a mess of the kitchen, unaccustomed to measuring things out or just generally doing anything like this in an orderly fashion. But that was fine, just meant she'd have the clean-up to occupy her time for a little longer, later. The key thing was that despite the mess, what she ended up putting into the oven was something that actually looked like a pie. Not a pretty pie, not like something you'd sell at a bakery or something, but a pie all the same. And it was hers.

And then it was time for her to sit on the floor in front of the oven, watching the pie baking.

[ooc: Mostly for the bro (with truly epic holiday-related SP), but can be open for others wishing to drop by as well.]