( friends is still a super generous term — especially when she'd actively work to keep as many people an arm's length away as she could, just so there'd be no verbatim repeat of an enemy learning her friends are her weakness, start with bellamy blake — but they could be tentative allies. she could get behind that title, at least eventually; has honestly already compiled an inner circle of confidants and co-conspirators in this quest to beat the captain at his own game, but none of them had offered to eat someone for her, and gazed at her with a soft sort of unearned... reverence? fascination? too intently, for someone who waffled between standing front and center of a group and assuming leadership, or else melting into the background and not being glanced at once.

and, yeah, clarke acknowledges that outside of thinly veiled hypotheticals, she hasn't told mizuki much about her home at all. it wasn't intentional omission, but too much information about the circumstances she'd left behind and wars she'd won tended to drag conversations dangerously close to those raw, barely knit-over wounds along her psyche — that lengthy list of secrets, of hard choices that still hurt to revisit. everyone at home knew what she had done, she'd earned a bloody title and reputation to go along with desperate war crimes. sue her a little if it's nice not immediately being feared because the passengers on the serena eterna don't know just how many kill marks should have been tattooed on her back.

still, she's given others a basic run down, and it feels like the least she could offer in return of how patiently he'd explained his world and fielded her follow up questions. so — )

I was born in space.

( this is the point where she sits up a little straighter, leaning just far enough away that it's no longer easy for him to touch her shoulder. )

About eighty years after a nuclear apocalypse wiped out all life on Earth and made the entire planet uninhabitable.