Chapter Text
There’s a bed against the center of the back wall. When they practically carried him in, knees dragging across the smooth floor, they deposited him on the edge of the mattress. Once the door clanged shut behind them, he crawled to the corner furthest from the entryway, tucked his legs into his chest, and blacked out.
“Octavia!”
His body jolts forward as he wakes up, crying out his sister’s name through the rawness in his throat. The fingers of his left hand feel almost glued together, curled into a loose fist. When he wiggles his fingers, the skin pulls taut, until the dry blood gives. Rust colored flakes flutter over his pants, settle on the floor.
The shaking starts in that hand, building with the rage and suffocating grief that started welling in his chest the moment he had watched his sister’s eyes glaze over and her limp body be pulled from his arms by something he couldn’t yet explain.
It’s an image that will never leave his mind, he’s sure. The thought sends enough strength through him to stand and rush the door on shaky legs. He doesn’t know when he raised his fist but suddenly pain is throbbing through his knuckles and feral screams are tearing through his throat.
He swings until his biceps burn and his voice gives out. Nobody comes.
Blood sluggishly pumps out of the abrasions across each knuckle, dripping across dried patches of his sister’s blood, and it only seems right. It’s an awful realization, that Octavia was right when she said that they belonged side by side, and he denied her again and again.
A sick feeling tempers his rage, weighing him down, until his knees buckle and he’s resting against the doorway. For all the grief he feels over his sister being dead feels undeserved now that he thinks about every time he was willing to let her die.
That night, in the bunker when his self righteousness blinded him, and he thought he was doing the right thing by poisoning her. He doesn’t know if he believed her so invulnerable, wearing Blodreina like armor, that he really thought her safe, or if he was willing to kill her even then.
Days later, it’s night again, she’s looking at him with big eyes, so willing to die for Gaia and Indra, for him, her people. He hardly recognizes himself, able to watch her walk into the line of fire, collapse on her knees, and accept her death so easily.
Night must be when this stranger takes over him, though he knows he can’t shift the blame so easily. There’s a darkness in his sister’s eyes, even 125 years later and a seemingly immeasurable distance between them and the bunker. He doesn’t understand why she is still so willing to kill blindly. Why Octavia only comes alive when blood stains her sword. He doesn’t ask, doesn’t comfort, doesn’t look to heal. There’s scorn on his face as he leaves her in that forest, delivering an unnecessary blow with cruel words.
“My sister died a long time ago,” his past self says.
If he could spit in that man’s face, he would. He knows nothing of dead sisters.
Eventually, he falls asleep in that position, waking only to the sound of a tray sliding through a slot in the door that shuts as quickly as it opened. Water sloshes over the edge of a soft bowl, into an already wet, smooth puree.
He’s in no position, woozy and thirsty as he is, to refuse so he digs in, ravenous, before suspicion can further sink in.
What feels like days pass like this, uncertainty sure to drive him mad. There are no visits, no demands, no threats. Only trays that slide in just as he’s starting to feel hungry, and disappear in the moments he gives in to sleep.
He shouts at the ceiling, tries to get a few words in before the slot closes, to no avail. The fourth time he receives a meal, he uses the hem of his cardigan dipped in water to get most of the blood off of his hand. The pain as he dabs at his scabbed over wounds is a welcome reprieve from the alternating waves of sadness, anger, and numbness.
After that, he pulls the sheet off of the mattress and retreats to his original corner. This is the only comfort he allows himself. The softness of the bed feels like more than he deserves. Instead of cushioning his grief, it burns through like acid.
On what he counts as day seven, the slot doesn’t open for a long time, and he begins preparing himself for contact, and starts to accept that this may be his end. A prisoner with no use is a waste of resources.
Hours later, the door slides open. Before he can stand, a weapon is pointed his way and a robotic voice orders him to stay back. Two more uniformed figures appear, holding a body dressed in white between them. They drag the person to the middle of the room, not daring to get close enough to him to deliver them to the bed, and let them drop.
As soon as the woman crumples to the ground, they exit the room.
He stays by the wall at first, observing and giving her time to rouse. After a few minutes of just her even, raspy breathing, he steps closer. She’s facing down, legs awkwardly folded underneath her body, and her thick almost-black hair covers any identifiable features.
Before he can approach any further, she lets out a deep groan, and shifts her head toward him.
“O?” He rasps out.
It can’t be, this has to be a dream. Maybe they did dose his food and he’s hallucinating, or—.
He’s dropping to his knees before he really thinks about it, pushing at her exposed left shoulder until she rolls onto her back. It’s his sister’s face staring back at him. The tank top she’s been dressed in shows off the tattoo wrapping around her right bicep, the scars on her arms, the one on her neck.
“Octavia,” he whispers as he cradles the back of her neck, tugging her up to rest against his chest.
Wherever his sister has been held left her cold to the touch. Whatever they did to her left bruises on both wrists and strange indents by her temples. Her eyes look sunken in and purple with exhaustion while the rest of her face remains colorless.
Although it seems they haven’t been feeding her like they did him, he’s so overwhelmed that he struggles to carry her to the bed. Through tears, he maneuvers her into his cardigan, lifts her back into his arms, and wraps her in the blanket.
He hasn’t done this since they first got to the ground back on Earth and she got sick but it feels right now— he rocks her. Back and forth, gently, and hums like he did when she was a baby and needed to keep quiet.
“I have you now, O. They won’t take you away from me again.”