To Speak A Lesser Thing
pt 1/?
AO3
Octavia is still clinging to Clarke’s hand with a desperation she doesn’t understand when the mob comes for Illian and drags him towards the burning Ark. She doesn’t see where they take him, or if they kill him, but she doesn’t care. She’s so tired. The muscles in her neck relax and her head flops back over Bellamy’s forearm, her fingers slipping through Clarke’s and out from where she’s lodged them under Bellamy’s jacket collar. Pain hits her over and over, waves of the stuff like the sea out near Luna’s rig. She bites her lip until she tastes blood.
“O?”
“M’fine.”
She’s not. She feels like she got trampled. Bellamy cups the back of her neck, bringing her head up to rest on his shoulder, and Clarke crouches in front of her, the light of the fire making her glow around the edges. Maybe it’s just the trauma. Or the blood loss. Octavia isn’t sure.
“How many fingers.”
“Three.”
“Well, if she has a concussion, it’s a minor one.”
Octavia digs her teeth into her tongue in an effort to stop from screaming as Bellamy shifts her body so Clarke can probe at things. Something in her lower half grinds together, pain shoots up her spine, and she bites down harder. Bellamy forces her jaw open. She moans, back arching. Clarke is unwrapping her bandages. It fucking hurts, it hurts it hurts it hurts. Her brother cradles her a little tighter, his cheek resting on her hair.
“Stop, O. Be still.”
Octavia doesn’t quite pass out in her brother’s arms, but she drifts. It hurts too much, all over, for her to really sleep so she doesn’t, just lays there, limp, against his chest. There’s a hand in her hair sometimes, a low, smooth voice in her ear.
“She’s bleeding again. The blast tore most of her stitches.”
It also made her lungs feel like someone filled them with dirt and rocks. She wishes she were coherent enough to tell Clarke that, but she can’t, because whenever she opens her mouth all that comes out is wheezy, choking coughs.
“Her fingers-”
“I know-”
Octavia moans, trying to form words. She wants to tell them that she’s cold, that it hurts, that she can’t breathe without shooting pains in her chest. Her brother murmurs in her ear.
“You’re alright, O. When the fire goes out we’ll get you fixed up.”
Niylah and the sight of her on her back in the flames clings to the front of Octavia’s brain. She thinks she cries for her at one point, begs her to be alright. She’s not sure. It hurts.
“Here, get the oxygen mask on her before we move her, Bellamy, she’s blue.”
And then she’s being lifted and it isn’t her brother, Octavia cracks open an eye just to check, it’s Kane cradling her. The sun, it must be midday, hurts her head.
“You…”
“Save your strength.”
Her voice sounds strange and weak in her own head. She needs to apologize to him. She was reckless. Her recklessness got her killed-wait, no, she’s still alive. Almost killed. It hurts. Indra. Indra was threatened. Is she still alive? She doesn’t know. Someone, Clarke maybe? Whoever it is is blonde and thin and too tall to be Clarke, Niylah, Niylah is fine, alive- her head hurts. She stops thinking. It doesn’t help.
“Hurts.”
“I know, Octavia. I’m starting an IV right now.”
Something tight around her bicep. A pinch. She whines. Her brother’s hand strokes her cheek.
“I’m going to give her something to sleep. I need to redo those stitches and she needs rest and I know she’s been awake the whole night.”
“Clarke, do you think that’s wise?”
That’s Indra. Octavia reaches blindly. A hand, smooth, small, calloused, wraps around her wrist and guides it back onto the mattress.
“Yes.”
“Okteivia. Relax.”
It hurts too much. There’s something cold flooding her veins and she can taste saline and the acrid tang of pain medication. It still hurts, and she’s still cold, but she’s suddenly too exhausted to care. Someone crawls onto the cot with her, lifting her into a lap. She’s not sure who it is, she’s too fuzzy. Her head hurts. She lets it fall onto a slim shoulder, sick, tired, in pain. Exhausted. The black behind her eyes swims. Somewhere around her, Indra is singing a lullaby. She’s never heard Indra sing before. Octavia feels her tired heart beat a little harder and she sinks into the warmth behind her as hands begin to tug at her shirt and spread stinging venom over her stab wound.
Octavia falls asleep.
~
She wakes up because she’s thirsty. She’s not in her bed, not in Polis, she’s somewhere else that her brain is less familiar with but that makes her groan all the same. Medbay. She can’t move her torso or either leg from the hip, and there’s quite the cluster of tubes in her body. Two in her arm. She can feel something in her chest and something snaking down her leg and fuck, she does not want to know.
She remembers what happened, it’s not that she doesn’t, she just doesn’t really feel like knowing what the damage is. She’s tired. She’s numb. She does not care what is currently wrong with her. She wants water, and she wants to go back to sleep until the world ends.
Knowing Clarke Griffin, she’s only going to get one of those things.
“Clarke.”
Her voice sounds like shit. She coughs.
“Clarke.”
Clarke doesn’t appear, but Niylah does, carrying a cup and a syringe with what Octavia dearly hopes is pain medicine.
“How are you feeling?”
Octavia shifts, whines at the pain, and rolls her head across the pillow. Niylah sets the cup down and goes to stick the needle into the tube in Octavia’s hand. It’s definitely pain medicine. The floating feeling hits her right away.
“Thirsty.”
Niylah presses a spoon to her lips. Ice chips. Octavia rolls her eyes at the excessive caution that comes with giving someone ice chips but takes them off the spoon anyways, sighing at the feeling of moisture in her mouth.
“You’re in pretty bad shape.”
“And you?”
Niylah startles, frowning and settling in the chair by Octavia’s bed. She looks exhausted, bags under her eyes, soot still clinging to her hair. She’d changed her clothes. Octavia notes sleepily that Niylah looks really good in blue.
“What do you mean?”
She’s clinging to consciousness as the medication draws her under, desperate to get an answer. Niylah got hurt because of her. Illian hurt her because of Octavia.
“You got, um, you know..”
“I’m fine. A little bruised, some smoke inhalation, but I’ll recover.”
Her eyes are half lidded. Niylah is surrounded by haze.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
Octavia can feel her words slurring together and she is annoyed.
“Illian…”
A cloth dabs at her face. Niylah laughs, a light sound, like the windchimes Raven made.
~
“You broke your pelvis. They had to cut you open to fix it, and there are screws in there. Holding you together. Along with stitches which are also holding you together.”
“Is that why I can’t move at the hips?”
Niylah fixes her with a look, daring her to say she’s been trying to move from the hips or even her lower back which, conveniently, has hairline fractures in it. Turns out falling off a cliff does a lot of damage, and the blast from Illian’s fireball had turned fractures in her pelvis that they’d missed into full on breaks. Octavia hates it. When she’s awake, which is becoming more and more frequent, she can’t move almost at all. Can’t go to the bathroom, can’t spar, can barely even move her arms off the mattress because if she does, it tugs her stitches and aggravates her injured back.
“Yes and if you know what’s good for you you won’t try, got it?”
Octavia rolls her eyes. Indra, sitting in a chair to her left, slaps the back of her head where it protrudes from her stack of pillows.
“Listen. You want to almost kill yourself a third time this week because you didn’t listen?”
She’s irritable. Bellamy is what calms her down, surprisingly. He sits by her bed when she’s being prickly, getting anxious, and he reads to her, or has her read out loud. It’s an old trick from back on the Ark and the part of Octavia that wants to leave the scared little girl behind hates that it still works, but the part of her that is injured and in pain clings to the comfort.
The mob that dragged him towards the fire must not kill Illian, because he’s there whenever she wakes up, zip tied to the bars of his cot and looking like he got the shit kicked out of him, which he did. He tries to talk to her, sometimes. She ignores him. She has nothing to say to him. She feels a strange, aching jealousy in her chest when he smiles at Niylah after she brings him food or water, or changes his bandages. She doesn’t shove it down but lets it fester. She wants to hate Illian, she really does, but she’s too- she doesn’t really know what she is, if Octavia is honest with herself, which she tries really hard not to be.
Word spreads that she’s doing better within hours of her first bout of consciousness, and her corner of medbay fills with visitors before she’s ready for anyone. She hasn’t seen her friends since before the City of Light fell, but she doesn’t want them to see her, not like this, not weak and bruised and barely able to sit up. She doesn’t seem to have much choice in the matter, because the next time she wakes up they’re all tumbling into medbay one after the other, crowding around her bed. It makes her itchy, claustrophobic. She hates it. She wants to send them away, wants Niylah to act on her clear irritation at the crowd in medbay, but there’s a guilt in her chest that doesn’t let her. Octavia hasn’t been around, hasn’t even been in contact, since a lot of really horrible shit happened. And they all seem so excited and relieved to see her breathing and in mostly one piece. She doesn’t have the heart to kick them out. She wishes she did though.
Jasper makes her uncomfortable. She feels guilty about it but the emptiness in his eyes, despite his constant off color jokes, rivals her own and Octavia can’t deal with it. She can’t. It’s terrifying and it makes her feel sick inside, dirty. It’s also seductive. Octavia wants to know what she can do to give up like that, deep in the pit of her belly. She doesn’t ask. Just smiles at him weakly and reaches out to squeeze his hand. When they all leave, Harper pressing a kiss to her cheek, Octavia tries to sleep away her desire to feel what Jasper is feeling. It doesn’t work.
In the days and hours following the visit, she thinks about it almost constantly, Jasper’s complete lack of concern for the end of the world and his own life, and the more she thinks about it the more it infects her, sliding under her skin and strangling her. Niylah is the only spot of sun. Clarke is gone, and her brother is in and out of medbay less and less as Praimfaya grows ever closer. Indra has returned to Polis. Octavia swallows, feels loneliness as clearly as she feels the pull of her stitches when Niylah has her manipulate the muscles in her arms and stomach.
Niylah’s changing her bandages when Octavia reaches for her wrist, gripping it between fingers that are still frustratingly weak. Niylah looks up at her, the slant of her nose catching the gray light from outside. Octavia keeps holding on.
“You alright?”
She nods, jerkily. She can play her reaction off on the pain. The bandage over her stab wound had been stuck to the stitches in places. It tugged something awful as Niylah had peeled it away. Niylah laces their fingers, the gauze forgotten on the sheets of the cot.
“You’re not alright. Talk to me, Okteivia.”
She shakes her head, tracing jagged patterns on her thigh. Her brother had found a pair of soft sleep pants for her, and a worn shirt, and helped her wash the blood and dirt and sweat off of herself before heading out on a scouting mission. She wishes he had stayed. She’s swimming in a sea of terror and guilt and self hatred and she’s barely keeping her head above water and Bellamy is an excellent life raft. She feels bare without her layers of leather, her sword, her tight ponytail. For the first time since Lincoln died, Octavia is truly exposed. Niylah taps between her furrowed eyebrows, smoothing the wrinkles with her thumb and a soft, gentle smile.
“Tell me what’s happening in that head, hmm?”
“Do you-” she swallows. Her mouth is dry. She doesn’t know why she’s asking this, but she needs to know. She has to. Her chest is tight, her breathing shallow, “do you think people can change?”
“Yes, of course. People change all the time.”
Silent tears make tracks on her cheeks. Niylah finishes bandaging her middle back up and changing the gauze pads that cover the stitches near her hips and the swell of her back. Octavia feels like the patchwork doll she had as a child. Disjointed, cobbled together. Almost ephemeral. She doesn’t believe Niylah. She can’t change. She can’t. She’s stuck. She doesn’t feel real. She doesn’t realize that she’s hyperventilating until Niylah leaves her to come back with a needle seconds later. A hand cups her face, stroking away sweat sticky hair. She wants to braid it, but it hurts to hold her arms up like that for more than a few seconds and she’s too proud to ask anyone else.
“Can I give you something? It’ll help you sleep.”
She nods. Niylah tugs at the waistband of her sweatpants and there’s a prick in the soft skin of her bruised thigh. She whimpers.
Niylah holds her hand until the drug takes her.
~
She’s doing her PT exercises when the men come for Illian a second time, likely to finish what they started the first time. Octavia looks anywhere but at him as he’s marched out of medbay, because he almost killed her with that stupid fucking stunt and definitely doomed the entire human race, and she understands the anger and the need for revenge the mob has. It doesn’t mean she helps them. She doesn’t stop them from dragging him out, either, but she doesn’t help them with it. She doesn’t need even more blood on her hands. She huddles back onto her cot, hides her face in the blankets, and pretends she’s asleep. A voice in the back of her skull that sounds distinctly like Kane whispers to her that by not helping, she’s compliant. She’s compliant, and Illian’s blood is still on her hands even if she doesn’t help pull the damn trigger. Octavia bites her lip until it bleeds to shut the voice up.
When the gunshot rings out, she flinches, buries her head farther into the covers, and tries not to think about the last time shots rang out against the metal walls of this fucking tomb they’re living in.
