An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 2/?
Fandom: The 100 (TV)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Octavia Blake/Niylah, Bellamy Blake/Raven Reyes
Characters: Octavia Blake, Niylah (The 100), Bellamy Blake, Raven Reyes, Marcus Kane, Abby Griffin, Indra (The 100)
Additional Tags: Military AU, Brain Damage, Marine Octavia, Army Medic Niylah, IEDS, Falling In Love, Deserts, "I hate sand" ~ Anakin Skywalker, Disability, Seizures, Chronic Pain, migraines, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Basketball, Minor Injuries, Semi Public Sex, Non-Linear Narrative
Summary:
Octavia Blake is tough as nails, accident prone, and beautiful, and it doesn’t take Niylah long at all to fall head over heels for the Marine that keeps showing up with cuts and bruises. The relationship blossoms fast and heavy, fueled by fear and lust and desert heat. Three months before Niylah’s commission is up, Octavia’s unit is involved in a roadside bombing. Octavia suffers, alongside other catastrophic wounds, a traumatic brain injury. Their attempts to navigate two months of separation, Octavia’s permanent brain damage, and the adjustment to civilian life, are messy, chaotic, and painful.
The final installment of Ella’s 18th birthday @linctavias I love you, daughter of mine.
Thanksgiving at the Griffin-Kane-Blakes, A.K.A. Clarke is a guilty big sister
Octavia comes with her mom to pick them up at the airport, and Clarke, who hasn’t seen her since about three weeks after her release from the hospital, feels her stomach turn to stone.
Her baby sister is half asleep on the bench near baggage claim, pale, too thin, and trembling. A push wheelchair sits next to her, a backpack in its seat. Abby has an arm around her, rubbing her shoulder with fingers Clarke knows are long and calloused and cool. Lexa reaches for her hand, squeezes it.
“She looks awful.”
“Maybe it’s just a bad day, Clarke.”
“I don’t- Lexa, she looks worse than she did in the hospital-”
“Clarke. Calm down.”
Abby sees them before Octavia does, nudging the younger woman gently and pressing a kiss to the top of her head. Octavia shifts in the seat like she wants to stand, but it’s too much effort and she goes back to resting against Abby’s side, her head pressed to the crook of her neck. Clarke swallows down a lump of fear. Octavia has never been that still, that weak, not even when she was seven and had the flu for two weeks.
“Hi, baby!”
Her mother stands up, still mostly holding Octavia, and extends her free arm. Octavia’s cloudy green eyes blink open and she shifts from Abby’s side to Clarke’s, slumping into her grip. Her sister’s spine stands out, rigid and prominent under her sweater.
“Oh, it’s so good to see you! Lexa, come here, let me look at you.”
Her mother is acting too normal, a forced normal. Octavia whimpers and Clarke barely has time to react before her sister’s left leg gives out. Clarke eases her into a chair, holding onto Octavia’s hand.
“Let’s get our bags and go home, hmm? Everyone’s excited to see you both!”
There’s a blanket in the car and Octavia tugs it over herself immediately, burying her face into it and falling asleep within seconds. Lexa strokes her hair absently, scrolling through her phone.
“Mom-”
“I think Raven is making that cake you like for Thanksgiving dinner-”
“Mom-”
“And Bellamy finished grading early, so we’re all pretty much free-”
“Mom!”
“What?”
“Octavia. She looks so sick, Mom, what the hell is going on?”
“Seizures. Her medication isn’t controlling them, and we’re having to give her rescue meds pretty much around the clock just to keep her out of the hospital. Her neurologist wants to admit her after the holiday until we can get them under control, but she’s fighting it, desperate not to go in.”
“She needs to! Look at her!”
“Clarke, you haven’t been here. It’s been-”
A stab of guilt, straight to her kidneys. Clarke swallows, turns around, and looks long and hard at her sister, who’s cuddled closer to Lexa in her sleep. She looks 12 again, on a long road trip, in the back of the old minivan. Maybe it’s just because she’s so thin.
“I know I haven’t.”
But maybe she needs to be.
They go out to dinner, like they always do on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Octavia is coming out of haze from the medication, and she’s even cracking shitty jokes like she normally does, flirting with Niylah, stealing fries off Clarke’s plate. She’s almost like the old Octavia, until it happens.
Her sister is mid sentence when she stops, head bobbing, and then throws up onto her plate before beginning to shake apart at the joints. Around her, her family becomes a well oiled machine. Bellamy scoops Octavia’s seizing body up and gets her on the floor, laying her head in his lap. Niylah begins to time the seizure on her phone, and her mom takes out Octavia’s rescue medicine, tugs up her sister’s dress, wipes a spot on her thigh with an alcohol wipe, and sticks it in her leg like an epi pen.
Everyone around them is staring, murmuring. There’s a woman watching the proceedings with open disgust, which Clarke understands given the fact that Octavia puked up barely digested food onto the table, but it still makes her bristle.
“Clarke, go get the car please? Lexa, go find someone for the check. Hurry, please.”
Octavia comes around slow, eyes blinking dizzily, bloody drool trailing from her open mouth, and then she begins to sob frantically. Raven steps in, then, cradling Octavia’s upper torso and head and cooing to her gently, a song in Spanish that’s beyond the range of what Clarke learned in 101. It helps, apparently, because it edges Octavia back from the panic attack and into quiet crying.
Clarke leaves to get the car, and barely makes it out the door before she’s crying herself.
Octavia sleeps most of Thursday, cuddling with whoever has a second to lay down on the couch with her. Clarke takes a shift, letting her baby sister curl into her lap, clinging to the rainbow teddy bear Niylah had gotten her while she was still in the hospital.
“Clarke?”
Octavia’s voice is slurred, the two back to back absence seizures she’d had at breakfast warranting another dose of rescue meds and the nausea, vomiting, and dizziness that come with the drug. Clarke presses a kiss to Octavia’s silky hair and stops flipping channels, pausing on a Star Wars marathon. Octavia perks up slightly.
“Yeah?”
“Miss you.”
“I’m right here, O.”
Her sister’s hand curls into the front of Clarke’s hoodie. The Death Star explodes on the TV screen.
“When you’re- no-”
“When I’m at home?”
“Uh huh.”
Octavia sniffles and then gags. Clarke holds the trash can and rubs her back as she gets sick, again, from the meds. It barely phases her, and she rinses her mouth out and then goes back to getting as close to Clarke as possible.
“We gotta get dressed for dinner later, O.”
Octavia shakes her head, pouting up at Clarke with those wide eyes that always got her her way when she was little.
“It doesn’t have to be fancy, ‘Tavia.”
“Mmmph.”
Raven is out making a booze run, and Niylah, who makes the best pies Clarke has ever tasted, is elbow deep in flour, butter, and the inside of a baking pumpkin, so changing Octavia into clothes she can wear out of the house falls to Clarke and Lexa. Octavia’s legs are jello from the meds and the fact that she’s dehydrated, but Lexa picks her up like she weighs nothing and carries Clarke’s former Marine of a baby sister up the stairs as easily as she carries their cat. Octavia is uncooperative, shoving her face in the blanket and still clinging to her teddy bear.
“Dress or pants?”
“Mmph.”
“O-”
“Dress or pants?”
Octavia sniffles, coughs, and then tears begin to roll down her grey cheeks, soaking into her hair and her blanket and her bear, when she buries her face into its soft stomach and her tears turn into big, hitching sobs. Lexa lays down on the bed and draws Octavia into her arms, rubbing her back and whispering to her, and Clarke stands, stock still, hand still on the closet door.
She can’t fix this. She can’t fix her baby sister and can’t make her stop crying, stop seizing, stop existing with brain damage that turns her into something Octavia has fought so hard not to be-
“Clarke.”
“Hmm?”
“She said leggings and a tunic top. The cranberry one.”
Octavia is still curled up, clutching her teddy bear and wrapped in a blanket, but there are no new tears on her cheeks. Clarke pulls out the clothes, kisses her baby sister’s head, and makes up her mind.
~
“We need to come back to New York.”
Lexa shifts beneath the blankets, tucking Clarke under her arm and pressing a kiss to her head before sighing.
“Clarke…”
“Lexa, she’s so sick. I need to- she needs me, and I-”
“Clarke, this isn’t a spur of the moment thing-”
“I need to do this! I need to be here for her, be with her-”
“She’s not dying, Clarke-”
Clarke chokes on a sob and then she’s hyperventilating, clutching at Lexa’s tank top.
“Baby, baby, what is it?”
“She al-almost DID and I couldn’t- we didn’t-”
“Shhhh, shhhhh, shhhh.”
“I- I- my baby SISTER-”
“Hush, shhhh, sweetheart.”
“We-we-we need to-”
“Okay, Clarke. Okay.”
~
They move in February, once Lexa has a new job and Clarke gets her residency moved to a hospital in the city. They’re 20 minutes from Bellamy and Raven and 10 from her parents, and thus Octavia and Niylah.
Octavia is better but not good, and the first thing they do is get the couch in the apartment so she can lay down on it. She’s on her back right now, dicking around on her phone and making bad puns. Clarke kicks her good foot gently as she walks past, laughs when her sister flips her off.
She knows that being close and being there to support isn’t going to fix every problem her sister’s injury has caused, but it makes her feel less like a shitty sister. It’s selfish, but it’s the good kind of selfish.
“I’m off Monday, O, do you want me to take you to the neuro?”
“Yes, second mom. Jesus, you people do know I can ride the subway, right?”
