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/]

Wonkru had been living in the bunker for two years. Not comfortably, not always harmoniously, but they'd lived, and they'd done so together as one clan. Sometimes that was enough. The fighting pits weren't pretty, weren't something Octavia thought she would have sanctioned on the ground, but they were necessary. For population control, for unity, for a grim reminder of what their enemy was.

( See content warning below. )

[ooc: NFB, NFI. Taken from The 100 S5, episode 11 (yes, we're skipping ahead for a bit, because this is flashback country in the original continuity). CONTENT WARNING for cannibalism and graphic murder of NPCs.]

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.]

On the Ground, no high point lasted for long.

Just about as soon as Octavia and Indra were close enough to Arkadia to be back in radio range, Miller's voice came through, hurried, like it wasn't the first time he'd done so in the last while. Pike had captured Kane, charging him with treason, and was planning to execute him. Only Miller and Harper remained free in Arkadia.

Before they'd finished drafting up their plans to break Kane and Lincoln and Sinclair out, an update came in: Pike had sentenced all of them to death.

And Bellamy wanted Octavia to meet him at the dropship after nightfall.

( So to the dropship Octavia went. )

[ooc: NFB, NFI, OOC okay! Taken from The 100 S3 episode 9. Content warning for NPC death and brief mention of suicidal ideation.]

Living on the Ground with a tattoo that was in the middle of healing was even more uncomfortable than it had been in Fandom, but Octavia welcomed it. She was unconfortable and unhappy and in pain all the time anyway, and there was a twisted comfort in making that physical.

Lincoln had given it to her, the way he'd meant to do with the design that she'd gotten on her right shoulder back on the island. Now her left shoulder cap had something on it, too: an abstracted version of a tattoo she tried her best not to think about and yet was so desperate not to forget that she'd had an echo of it etched into her own skin. Stark black lines instead of ornamental filigree: an asymmetrical, slightly open circle, with three marks shaped like the letter V.

A skull with butterflies on it.

Octavia was doing her best at taking care of it as it healed. It gave her something to focus on, and something that felt almost like -- honoring her connection to Fandom. That was how Lincoln put it, anyway. She wasn't sure it was how she would.

No matter how little they spoke of it, they both knew she didn't want to just honor it, she wanted to go back.

( But to say there were other distractions, too, was an understatement. The situation on the Ground was so volatile, Octavia could barely keep track. )

[ooc: NFB, NFI, OOC okay! Summarized with some major tweakage from The 100 S03 eps 3-5.]