first one who touches the ground loses

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.]

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.]