Chapter Text
From the cradle Clarke Griffin had been taught one thing: the Ark comes first.
It was such a constant in her life that she never once thought to stop and think about the meaning behind that statement. What exactly constituted 'the Ark'? Was it the scrapped together settlement set in orbit around a planet the a century prior humans had destroyed in their ignorance? Was it the people that filled those bio-engineered tin walls that had survived the rigors of space from that first populace? Or, perhaps, was it the Upper Elite; the ones that made the rules and governed in accordance of what came before?
At the age of seventeen, Clarke realized she didn’t care.
The Ark was sick. Dying. The cancer spreading from its eldest bolt-welder to its newest child. And, to keep their power intact, the council decided no one needed to know. Once again proving ignorance was the downfall of man.
“We’ve tried several options but none of them have worked." The medical chief and senior council member Abigail Griffin told her daughter in the sterile concrete confinements of the Sky box. "More people are coming down with oxygen deprivation symptoms. We are beginning preparations for project Exodus. Don’t you see Clarke? We’re going to the ground.”
“So,” she looked at her mother blankly, “you executed my father … for the lie … of six more months.”
“Clarke, baby, please understand, I loved your father but it was necessary. People would have panicked if he told them what was happening and that would have cost lives.”
It's already cost lives! Clarke wanted to yell, wanted to rage, but it wouldn't have done any good. For the first time in her life she looked at her mother and saw a stranger.
She vaguely wondered how her mother saw the Ark. If she saw them as people; individuals with cares and fears and lives. Or if she saw them as the sum of their parts; a colony of ants with no drive except what was best for the whole.
She wondered if it even mattered anymore.