archenemy | clexa

one

Clarke will die in seven hours.

Her watch is too large for her wrist and quite old, but it shows the time well enough. Clarke is 17 years and 364 days old. When the last day of her 17th year runs out, two guards will take her out of her cell, more or less drag her to the airlock chamber and there, in presence of the chancellor and her mother, her body will be sucked into open space. Clarke has often envisioned it. Spending a year in a plain prison, single cell, no visitors allowed, doesn't offer much else to do than thinking.

Over and over, the scene of her execution has played in her head. She isn't going to protest, fight, or make herself look ridiculous, but if Wells should be there, Clarke is definitely going to give him the look of blame. The whole Griffin family line is going to be erased because of one single, immature boy and Clarke can't stand it.

Her short, black pencil flips over and over between her fingers as her eyes try to make out a free spot among her art-covered prison room walls.

Everything is filled with sketches and drawings, sometimes of people she knows, sometimes of people she used to know, sometimes the Earth from above or how Clarke imagines it from the ground and sometimes the moon and planets. Back when she wasn't stuck in this cell holding no more than a slim bed, Clarke read so much and looked through so many of the artefacts left over from the old world, that there are other drawings of Earth too. Of animals, primal huts, temples, women in Renaissance dresses, castles and what were once considered important and revolutionary people.

Whatever came to Clarke's bored mind.

Now, she is itching to bring another artwork on her overused canvas of a room. Her heart is tearing with the thought of those seven hours of her life ticking away, and she feels terribly like she hasn't made herself matter.

Over the course of the last year, she has brought her soul to the walls of this small, headache-white room and put her heart into a used up pencil. Yet, it feels like when she'll die, she'll die without that she has ever mattered at all.

Her friends are, to large extent, prisoners about to be executed within the span of a few weeks or months. Wells can go fuck himself. Her dad is dead and her mom was only granted a delay of execution due to momentary lack of doctors. By the time new year will roll around, there may as well be no one left who even remembers her.

Clarke Griffin, one among thousand faceless people in the execution register.

Clarke is burning with the temper to change this, hot with the desire to make these few hours left matter. Behind the blue of her eyes, passion is blazing like the missiles that ended the world, and the pencil pushes into the metal floor as if it wants its last hours to mean something too. For milleniums people have eternalized their lives through art. Who was to say Clarke Griffin could not immortalize herself like this, even if it was just until the cleaning staff would wash it off?

She is interrupted by the sound of a short, heavy knock and the immediate response of the security door opening. Two guards rush in, just like they have countless times in Clarke's nightmares, and Clarke is driven up and against the wall by their electrified sticks.

Clarke doesn't even think when she grasps the well-known edges of the small window above her and pulls herself up in order to kick the guards' faces. Her boots connect with their noses, their foreheads. She uses the momentum of surprise, slips between their tumbling bodies and pushes the door into the lock behind her.

The corridor is empty. The rails are lit by the Ark's fluorescent light. Clarke can look right over to other prison rooms, the pit beneath her ending in nothing but the same neon light, metal rails and security doors everywhere. Everything is identical. No one is to be seen but a patrolling guard here and there above and beneath Clarke. Her panting is the only sound to be heard.