Ground Down

Chapter 46

By the time Clarke reached the war chamber, she could hear Lexa speak to the heads of units and ambassadors inside, and her voice carried fluently. With Titus cutting in here and there. She couldn't make out the woman who had appeared in the door to ask the Commander out of Raven's room, the General of the Army, the highest authority in the Coalition. Doctor Becca Franko. As elusive as she was weird, in Clarke's opinion at least, not that she should say that out loud. 

Clarke rolled her lips in, frowning at the door as if it were to blame for the persistent buzzing in her head or the nausea in the pit of her stomach. Maybe she'd make a shitty doctor, maybe that was just the truth, doctors should not get repelled by their patients, should not get nauseous trying to help or be left with their eyes burning from tears not cried and their hands ever so slightly shaking. She'd fucked her studies. Then again, when you found yourself standing over somebody whose body already betrayed the traces where death's starved hands had slipped off, you didn't need to have studied medicine to get that crawling feeling on your neck that made the tick, tick, tick of time passing violently tangible. That feeling that made you consciously aware just of how narrow the threshold between life and death was and how quickly it could suddenly lie right in front of you, or right behind you. Like in the forest, soaked through, smelling burning flesh. 

The smell still lingered in her nightmares. Made her wonder whether she'd start seeing Gaia in her dreams, too, because she couldn't shake that image of her sceptically squinting at her through the transparent boards in Raven's lab and when she let that linger in her mind for too long and it started to overlap with everything she had just seen, she remembered that she had smelled of herbs dried over a fire. And that she moved like a trained dancer but could glare like she wanted to rip your throat out, and the feeling of despised emptiness when Clarke had turned and found that vent grid hanging off its hinges, the realisation that she'd been a planted spy. And that she'd been good at it, she'd fucking played her and Clarke had hated her for it, but, standing in front of the door right then, she wished she'd do it again. 

A person couldn't... you just wouldn't do that to yourself, from a medical perspective, she doubted a person would be capable of doing that to themselves, of... She'd seen patient charts of soldiers they had brought in after they'd been held captive, like Anya's chart, she'd seen what people were capable of doing to each other, and the first time she'd seen a soldier who had undergone that, had seen in person what the chart had told her, she'd had a nervous breakdown in a hospital bathroom stall. So, if that was possible, if people could do it to each other, she supposed a person could do it to themselves if they had a really determined mind, but she really didn't want to imagine that because it hurt as if the outer layers of her brain became inflamed. 

Something stuck to her wrist, she touched it on instinct because it was the sticky kind of stiff that impeded the rotation of the joint. Drying wound fluids stuck to her fingertips, she knew without looking, she knew from the consistency and she wiped both her hands on her dress with her neck craned towards the ceiling, rubbed them up and down her hips. Which got the layers of her dress all bunched up, she cursed to herself while she tried to sort them out and hide the smears of blood and whatever else in between them. She could pass that off as rust. Or something. Because fabric totally rusted. Made sense. Clarke pursed her lips, found a smeared stain on her arm and scrubbed her thumb over it with her teeth bared. A headache threatened to creep in behind her temples. 

Politics. Politics, politics, politics, not medicine. Clarke rubbed her arm against her ribs, drew a long, shivering breath in through her teeth, and pushed the doors open. All the heads of unit, all the ambassadors, one Commander, and one Titus turned to face her. The General of the Army did not turn, she noticed out of the corner of her eye because her eyes didn't want to move off the Commander no matter how hard she pulled, but, on the edges of her vision, the General remained where she stood behind the Commander's throne as if overlooking the whole of Polis under a bleak dawn was a sight she'd never encountered before.