come_sailaway | We're wide awake now, our eyes are wide open. We're running this world, we keeping it turning

Clarke Griffin? Smells good?

This is a pleasant accusation that's shocking enough she's even moved to lift her head — lift the arm that Ava isn't currently trying to nap against, and give her own armpit a sniff. And... you know what, she does smell good. A bit like laundry detergent and dryer sheets. The undertone of linen fresh scented deodorant, and the brisk bouquet of soap and shampoo. And yeah, she probably hasn't showered in the past four days, but that's hardly the longest she's gone. It takes some getting used to, that there aren't water rations, and that she's safe enough in her cabin to lock all the doors and drop enough of her guard to get naked and vulnerable enough to bathe.

All of those had been... nonexistent novelties during her time on Earth. And maybe one of the few things Clarke enjoys on this cruise liner. This is the first time she's realized she doesn't necessarily reek of blood, mud, sweat, and death. And it's weird.

Meanwhile, her mouth is running —

"I was born in space, so I guess that technically makes me an alien. But like... that's just semantics. I don't want anyone's body."

Edited 2022-05-08 06:31 (UTC)

It's the first time in awhile she's tried to keep up with any sort of bathing routine, and Undine has helped her with her hair that she used to fight so much against. But doing laundry has quickly worn off its novelty, and Ava's fallen back into the habit of wearing the same outfit day after day. Figures nobody can judge too much when she rarely allows anyone to see her.

She listens curiously as Clarke reveals a bit about herself, and ponders whether or not she's really an alien. Squinting through blurred eyes, Clarke looks like a regular boring human to her, so she shakes her head a bit without her opinion even being asked. "Space sounds neat," she comments, a bit jealously. She rather be in space than on a boat. "I was smuggled as a child."

"Space is... hard."

Single child policies punishable by death, limited food and water rations, a distinct disconnect from their ancestors because human history can't survive 100 years in space based on whatever goodies ancient astronauts decided to bring with them — without knowing they'd never return to the Earth. Oxygen deprivation, selective cullings, infighting, that overarching utilitarian press to squash every human part of you and become a cog in the machine dedicated to survival of the human race...

Space had sucked. The ground had always been the dream, and that had ended up sucking too. Now the ocean sucks, and Clarke's quickly becoming disillusioned to any long-held idea that there'd ever be peace.

But for whatever hardships she'd been dealt, human trafficking just straight up hadn't been a thing in her time. And —

"That's barbaric. And I'm sorry that happened to you."

She gives a bit of a disappointed sigh, because of course reality never quite lives up to the fun escapist fantasy that movies are trying to sell. As much as she enjoys Alien, it's nothing she'd actually want to experience. Whatever makes space a hard, Ava believes her, doesn't take it just as the overdramatic claim of a teenager that seems to think everything in life in unfair. (Because truthfully, everything in life is unfair.)

Ava shakes her head, presses her fingers to Clarke's mouth. "You're supposed to say something mean," she reminds her.

The fingertips against her lips is more of a shock than the oh-so-casual reminder of how she was supposed to be conducting herself right now. It's never not going to be weird to be hushed so physically, and where Ava seems to be expecting perpetual bullying, there's only a few moments of stupid blinking before Clarke can regain her composure.

"...maybe."

A hand at Ava's wrist, gentle but very firm in pushing the other woman's hand away from her mouth.

"But I'm tired. And I couldn't mean it if I tried."

Never really means to be mean, actually.

She slips her rejected hand away and reunites it with her other, twisting fingers through each other.

"I wasn't sure you ever actually slept," Ava laughs. She barely manages herself, but she at least spends periods of time with her eyes closed and enjoying the quiet. She imagines Clarke beating up on her pillows and demanding they reveal hidden secrets to her, and giggles again at the mental image.

"Did you ever make it over?" she asks softly.

Hey, Clarke sleeps!

...sometimes. Usually once she's surpassed the brink of absolute exhaustion, and only for a few hours at a time. And usually with little more than a few blankets dragged onto the floor because the bedding itself is too soft, so the pillows are safe. There's a light scoff above Ava's head at the implication, but even drunk off her ass, Clarke can recognize her argument would be weak and flawed. So she eventually just shrugs, mostly with the half of her body not sandwiched against the other woman so as to not dislodge her.

"I did. I flew that time, isn't that —" Cool? People don't do that where she comes from unless it's a zero-gravity space walk with the constant threat of ancient helmets cracking and sucking every trace of oxygen from one's lungs. Still worth it, as she's been told, but scary.

But anyway, in a world where people can meld through the walls, she doesn't imagine flying is all that novel. One more partial shrug, as if to excuse her childish exuberance.

"Didn't find anything really useful, though. Did you know there are actual gods here, though?"

"Oh, cool," Ava says what Clarke won't. And it's true there's plenty of methods of flying where she's from, but it's limited to a select few. Falcon with his military tech wings, and Iron Man with his billions of dollars, and the Vision being whatever the fuck he is that's partially like her and something else entirely. But she's never flown. It seems a nice ability. She'd love to just drift away.

She hums a bit in disappointment for Clarke, she seemed so determined to get some sort of answer. Ava pats her on the arm she's leaning against.

"There's this god where I'm from. Thor. Big hunky man with a hammer," she mumbles. "But how good of a god can they be if they're stuck here like the rest of us pathetic meatbags."

It's true, a big hunky man with a hammer sounds way more useful than a 5'5" baby faced creature with a lute, performance issues, admittedly killer dance moves, several thousand years worth of emotional baggage and commitment issues. Clarke snorts a little, rolls her eyes skywards as if any actual competent gods were there to beg to.

"No, I think he's just as much of a pathetic meatbag. Maybe even more so, but... Who knows, I guess? Most people here aren't what they seem at first blush."

Let's hope Thor never shows up because Ava never wants to be held responsible for her weird celebrity crush. Or deal with another dramatic storm.

"Mn," she wonders what even defines whoever Clarke is talking about as a god then. But all the worlds seem to be working with different sets of rules. "And what do I seem?"

...okay but like, Clarke already thinks storm gods are kinda hot. Jenny bounced already, don't deny her a competent deity Ava.

Though that's a very successful segue onto a new topic and has Clarke pressing her head back against the wall once again with a throaty hum. As quick as she'd been to level Ava with titles like useless and self-serving based on their previous interactions, she doesn't forget to peel back the wallpaper and look beneath for the root cause.

"Sad. Maybe tormented. Am I off the mark?"

"I'm not sad," Ava protests. She is, in a way that drowns out everything else she tries to feel. In a way that makes it so difficult to even realize just how sad she is because it's been her baseline for most of her life. She's a reasonable amount of bitter and upset with her circumstances, the way anyone else is. She just doesn't want to scream about it anymore, Dr. Pym took the brunt of everything she bottled up. She fought and pushed and kicked and screamed and failed to accomplish anything other than making herself pitiful enough to receive mercy she doubts she deserved.

She breathes out.

"I'm funny," she says weakly. "And good at puzzles. And I'm intimidating and..." she doesn't really know. She doesn't have that great of a grasp of who she is outside of all the things she used to be and will keep on denying until it's too late.

"...and sad?"

There's absolutely a sort of grief that transcends human understanding. The sort that doesn't manifest in tears or night terrors, but festers just beneath the surface and slowly eats you alive. I'm not sad, Ava insists, but what use is an outside prospective if not to dig past self righteous beliefs and hit a little too close to home?

Ava exhales, and Clarke sighs. She's so god damn tired.

"You can be all of those things at once, you know. And I'm sorry about before. I don't think you're actually useless, and it's not my right to push you through whatever you're dealing with. I just don't want us all to die for no reason here, and I think every one of us here is going to have to fight to make sure that doesn't happen."

Edited 2022-05-14 05:07 (UTC)

"And sad," Ava finally agrees, sadly. There's nothing self-righteous about it, just a girl that put all of her energy into the singular goal of fixing herself, thinking it would somehow undo all the cumulative damage. And realizing that ultimately she's hardly any better for it. There's too many pieces of herself that won't fit back together, no matter how she tries to rearrange them.

"This is the best my life has been," she says, and it's all a lie. A wound that Clarke seems to enjoy rubbing salt into, some twisted sort of glee at being right.

She shakes her head at the apology, as if it hasn't been eating her up. "I don't think you're wrong, to fight. All I wish is you'd take better care of yourself. Hold on to your strength. Instead of burning yourself out like I've done."

It's not that Clarke enjoys rubbing salt in open, bleeding wounds. Sometimes she just favors a more aggressive approach, or rather, treatment; sometimes the necrotic tissue needed to be cut away, the edges re-aggravated to encourage the skin to knit back together. Sometimes she's mad and doesn't care how she goes about galvanizing people so long as it works. She clings to the notion of being right all the time because every time she's been wrong, someone dies.

There's always time for regrets later, anyway. If they survive long enough to process them, which is never a guarantee. And oh, the fight...

"I don't —" Clarke pauses here, mind racing through a slog of alcohol like car tires getting stuck in wet cement. Her unencumbered hand comes up, wavering in a so-so gesture as she tries to figure out how to explain herself. Not that it's a hard concept to communicate, just rough to actually admit.

"I don't know how to do that, anymore." How to stop, how to rest. How not to burn herself down like a candle thrown into an incinerator. What if the fight is all we are, whispering in her ear as she sighs into Ava's hair again. "If I don't burn, the rest of them will..."

"Hey," Ava says gently, an awkward attempt at petting Clarke's arm. "This is a start, isn't it? I don't..." she doesn't know who the rest of them are. Allies that Clarke's found upon the ship, she supposes. She's avoided her own social life enough that she isn't particularly nosy about whatever cliques the teenagers are forming, or whatever relationship drama is going on that night. She feels far too old for any of that, but she envies it too. The ability to just... connect. People keep telling her that she should, that there's strength in numbers, that she needs to stop disappearing or pushing everyone away.

And maybe this is a start for her too. Trying to repair something that felt better off broken.

"I don't have any answers, because I failed. All I have are my mistakes," Ava reaches to play with a strand of Clarke's hair. She's never been around other women much, has always found them a bit intimidating with how they're meant to balance being so many different things at once, things that she's never learned. But there's something more relatable in Clarke that she finds.

"I fought for so long for the right to exist, let it consume me. That when I finally... when I was given mercy from my suffering. I realized I don't even know how to live. It just feels so empty. So yes... maybe I'm fooling myself, trying to enjoy some food I can barely pronounce. Relax in the hot tub, learning to braid hair. They're stupid things. But I need that."

It's a stupid, childish, selfish desire — but Ava tugs at the end of her hair, and Clarke immediately wishes the other woman would card her fingers across her scalp and pet down any fly away strands like her mother used to. The tightly held tough exterior that sticks in place even when she's drunk off her ass on the floor of a gaudily carpeted hallway is still just covering cracks in an eighteen year old's inadequacy issues and undigested personal traumas. And sometimes she just wants to be seven years old and safe again. Just wants her mom —

Especially during hard moments, when faced with mountains of logic that she can comprehend, but still struggles to apply to her own life. Maybe Ava is just who Clarke's going to become in the next decade, when she finally exhausts every recourse she's got and is faced with every single mistake she ever made. Maybe they didn't have any right to exist, if existence was so hard-won and painful. But then — why? Why the fiercely burning drive in her chest that insists she can't stop, that she deserves to live and maybe some day even be happy? Is that just another childish notion held close to her heart or...

"Life is supposed to be about more than just survival," Clarke admits in a quiet, mumble. Nevermind that, come tomorrow, she'll return to defining herself about what she fights about and who she fights for. In this moment, it's smile or cry. It's seek out that human connection, or fall apart at the seams. And summarily she's offering —

"I'll braid your hair for you. I can do a neat princess braid, I'll show you how..."

Deprived of sources of affection mixed with a difficulty of touch, Ava both craves and pointedly avoids it. Yet the fuzzy edges of her brain can't access that instinct right now, to push away. Instead she just holds onto Clarke as the hallway continues to sway, fingers brushing at tangles she finds. She too missed her mom, misses Janet... yet another connection in her life cut off too soon.

"Probably so," she agrees, has no idea what to suggest that may be. Survival and pain is all she really knows. There's so many stupid basic skills she lacks, things nobody bothered to care to teach her because they weren't related to her purpose. And now Clarke is offering...

"Princess," she scoffs quietly, as if she's above such things. And then, even quieter. "My favorite is Rapunzel," she admits, a sort of shameful secret that she's ever bothered with fairytales. But she can relate, locked away from the rest of the world.

"Yeah, but go slow," she requests. "My hands don't always work."

If Disney survived the apocalypse is up for debate, but there's still probably stories akin to the good ol' Grimms Fairy Tales, or at least oral tradition folklore passed down through space locked generations. Probably enough for Clarke to know Rapunzel was a princess with long blonde hair, locked away until love persisted. It'd be easy to stretch her imagination and draw parallels between an imprisoned princess and a victim of human trafficking, but this isn't the place. She's too drunk to do it delicately or kindly, and what would it actually matter? Not every moment with a person has to be seen as an opportunity to plumb the depths of their personhood and gauge how much use their hurts could lend to her cause.

Nah, she'd offered to braid Ava's hair. And while maybe she'd meant at some point in the near future, there's also nothing wrong with right now.

"C'mon."

This time Clarke jostles the shoulder the woman's been leaning against for the better part of ten minutes, urging her up and fussing with both hands until Ava's turned her back enough that she's proper access to her hair. There's no comb nearby, and after a hot party environment, no way her hair's free of sweat. But Clarke's made the best of worst situations, and offers a few quiet shhhhh's to any of Ava's objections before working her fingers into the brunette locks at the root.

Shitfaced or not, she's done enough princess braids on herself throughout her life that it basically comes as second nature. A few tugs here, some finger combing here, gentle detangling with soft sorry's whispered under her breath if Clarke thinks she might be hurting Ava. And give her a good five to ten minutes, and a mysteriously produced hair tie, and the end result isn't horrible. Clarke's proud enough, at least, and hums in the back of her throat while fussing with a few fly away hairs she couldn't tame.

Edited (lol) 2022-05-17 07:37 (UTC)

We're wide awake now, our eyes are wide open. We're running this world, we keeping it turning

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