[open log] i don't care about the mess you made

[strove]

WHO: Clarke Griffin, Riku, and Goro Akechi + anyone who wants to do some dreams or other stuff
WHERE: Dreams, New Amsterdam.
WHEN: Month of January IC!
WHAT: Dreams, memory shares, etc. General open log things.
NOTES OR WARNINGS: Mentions of suicide and suicidal ideation for Akechi and Clarke (respectively).

[Riku, Clarke, and Akechi couldn't be more different on the surface—but when it comes to dreams, to the control of the mind and the actions they take, the similarities come together. Oddly enough, each of them has some experience over this space. Riku, through being a Dreameater. Clarke, through Josephine taking over her body and through having to fight back against the sociopathic scientist. And Akechi through the metaverse, having to traverse it alone. That's not to say that they have special powers here: but control is something that will come more easily, as will lucidity.

Of course, thematically they're different:]

riku: mistakes of the past, worries of the present

[These days, Riku is more or less at peace with himself. Once, his dreams were mercurial and lacked control. They showed his worry about strength. Power. And at times, Darkness—the Darkness that reigned over his life, that acted as a threat. These days, that Darkness is as much a part of him as anything: trapped in his heart, a constant in motion. A part of who he is.

But there are themes and motifs that reoccur. Friends fading away. The danger of thinking too much, even if the thoughts don't string together. A friend slipping, falling into a wave of Darkness. More recently: images of his home falling apart, of New Amsterdam falling to the same ruin, crashed into by a wave of dangerous Darkness.

And of friends dying. Of not being able to do enough. Of the struggle of having to accept that they will do as they do, even if he can't do nothing. His hands always tied, forced to be idle, passive. Accepting that, too.

There is always a push for logic against even the most irrational of thoughts. Always.]

clarke: guilt, the lives she's taken, a peaceful interlude

[Many of Clarke's dreams take place separate from what would be her mindscape. Her dreams are of green: sprawling trees with a beautiful, forested canopy. A bright sun overhead, though sometimes there are two. But in the horizon, there may or may not be ruin: ruins of a city that managed to come together in the aftermath of an apocalypse, or ruins of a world, covered in dirt and sand, and strange creatures that burrow into the ground and can dig into someone's skin. She doesn't dream of those creatures, not often.

When she can, Clarke dreams of what could be: a life in this area of rich, fertile environment. A time with her daughter, her mother, her friends. Bellamy is there when he can be, but during times of strife, it seems she has a hard time facing him. (This Bellamy is older, with facial hair and a calmer expression. Like he knows to keep what he can inside.)

When there are people present, there is always a pressure. Of being boxed in, of being the one to find the solutions. Clarke always feels as if her answers are the wrong answers, and they show here. But there is no resentment toward the many, many people in her life: angry, making demands. Just an acceptance. Clarke doesn't feel as if they're wrong to ask so much of her. Besides, she put herself in that position to ask to make those decisions.

After all, she is a mother. A leader. But also: a tumor. A cancer. These days, Clarke doesn't let those thoughts creep up, but in dreams, who can say?]

akechi: wasted potential, what could have been

[Akechi doesn't dream of exact moments or of exact places: he dreams of the settings he likes, with drawn out, complicated scenarios where he's called upon to solve a problem. Solve any problem. Because he is someone who came into his power at an age when he was already embittered by the world, embroiled in hatred for everything around him. His mother committed suicide when he was young, and he was forced to be passed from home to home, a blemish upon his family and upon the world. An illegitimate child and a problem. Rather than choosing to overcome these notions, Akechi internalized them, took them to heart.

His dreams reflect this: colored often in blacks and reds, with Akechi moving alone, carrying every purpose that he believes that only he can accomplish. His dreams are a sign of how he deluded himself: believing that his long term plans would become something at some point.

He is extremely intelligent, and his dreams show it: with him trying to make logic out of nothing, out of the world around him. He seems to be at odds with it, caught between a sense of justice (inherently emotional) and a world out of order, one that's inevitably going to be that way no matter what.

If Akechi's gambit had paid off—if he had been aware that he was a part of a game with a gambit in motion—his view of the world would've taken hold. It would've fallen into disarray, granting control to a single deity because people are inherently messed up. At the heart of his dreams, this is a singular, notable truth. It's just one that's at odds with what Akechi really wants: to be praised, loved, and seen as less than a blemish and more that someone who can accomplish things. He just hasn't admitted as much to himself.]

ooc notes

[The general overview here is to give people an idea of what my characters' dreams would contain. This is an open log, and you can request a starter hitting on one of the notes above! I'll also be posting closed requested starters below. I'm also open to memory sharing or characters just catching up, though the former may need to come along organically (as none of my three know it's on the table).

If you'd like to discuss further, hit me up on plurk @ medieval or on discord at alison#8996.]

Comments

[hierophante]

[OA regards Clarke's open palm for a long few moments, surprised in spite of herself. Surprise, as it is wont to do, gives way to another of those little bouts of not-quite-laughter, just shy of a snort, and she reaches out to take the hand in her own, nodding her own signature to the truce. Not that they'd been at odds, exactly, but she had unintentionally done harm.

It's... nice. Nice taking refuge in touch. Easier in dreams -- OA's gut still lurches, but the strange logic of dreams soothes the body where it might otherwise flinch.]

I admit I'm curious what you'd conjure for me, if that's even how this works.

[Wouldn't it be fascinating if it were? Intriguing and horrible all at once. Would Clarke's imagination be kind? Would it shield her from the ghosts that haunt her own psyche? Or, in the absence of detail, would it fill in details far worse than reality? She knows Hap's voice now, but not his face -- out of what monstrous visage might that voice come, should he make an appearance at all?]

I'm happy to try to lead someone through the dark. I'm good at that. I know how to get around in it.

[A brief surge of amusement precedes a chuckle. She's speaking metaphorically, but not strictly. The literal is also true.]

I don't think I'm here to lead other people into it.

[Not her own, anyway. She can encourage them to look into their own, to gaze tenderly upon their own darkness and to realise there's nothing there to fear, but she can't force that either. Or... wouldn't. It's a line she has to draw, one she isn't always able to prevent herself overstepping, but she reassures herself with the certainty that as long as she can see where the line ought to be, she isn't like him.]

The deeper I go, the more I'm going to... remember, and I'm not quite sure how that happened before, the... sharing. I'm sorry. I wish it had been a kinder one.

[In any case, it isn't a no, exactly. But if the city shifts and gentles and leads them into the green, OA isn't going to fight it. There's enough dark to wade through in her own dreams.

She gives Clarke's hand a gentle squeeze, aiming a smile in her direction, genuine warmth crinkling the corners of her eyes.]

She did mean for me to understand, the woman who told me that, about surviving. She knew that to be wounded is to be given proof that you're living.

[The words themselves may be grim, but OA's tone isn't, and the emotions that begin to filter through the bond certainly aren't. On the contrary: she feels lightened. More than surviving.]

The secret is tenderness, I think. Staying open to it. Tenderness for yourself, too. For the places you come back to. Especially those.

[A sweeping gesture of her free hand: this place, the tower, the end of the world. The aches at which one worries like a tongue at a sore tooth.]

Your mind gave us this place for a reason; I don't know if we should ignore that.

[strove]

I think I was seeking common ground. [The City of Light is a place from her memories, but it's also the first place that was a city for her. It's where her mind went to when she first showed up in New Amsterdam, terrified and listening to the sounds of guns shooting off in the distance. In a way, this is like sharing a memory, but more grounded and real.] I don't know how it'll go from here. The train system that I'll create will be one from pictures and memories. I guess it'll be educational for you.

[That's a very mild way to put it. Educational. The feeling within Clarke is uncertain. Not in the touch of OA's hand—Clarke will always feel more whole with her hand in someone else's—but in how all of this works. It's a fleeting, light feeling. Human, rather than entrenched in anything else.

It's time for her to explain. How is this common ground?]

What you saw of my world was more real than this place. The City of Light was a fiction created by an AI hoping to protect humanity from that. But it was a place that also stripped people of their pain, cutting it away the moment they accepted that escape.

[That may pass along the wrong intention. Clarke feels momentarily frustrated. Again: it's not a deep, thriving emotion. It's short, surging and leaving, hidden within the necessity to pass information on to someone else.]

I don't know if it's trying to help me seek freedom from the pain of where I stood. Maybe it was. But I do think it was common ground, and ... more than that, I do think my mind believes the City of Light can be shaped to what's needed. [At that, she begins to pull OA forward with purpose. Her steps aren't quick or rushed. She just needs to leave this spot and see the city.

All of the buildings around them have high glass windows that reflect the outside surroundings. Seeing inside is impossible, as if that much detail can't be rendered within this space.]

I'd try to conjure up a memory of what it was like then. I could see this world, but I didn't know what I was doing. Where I was going. And I was in a lot of pain. I wouldn't want ... I don't want you to experience that.

[hierophante]

[OA picks up her pace obediently, by habit unruffled at being led. It strikes her that if anything it bothers her even less here and now than it ever did when she was blind, when people were prone to mistaking the exertion of control over her for an act of kindness. Her blindness had been an excuse to guide her, to infantilise, to patronise, to touch her without her solicitation.

This is different. It's undertaken willingly, for one. OA also doesn't get the impression that Clarke is ushering her along out of the assumption that it's something she needs. Strange, really, how accepting help hurts less the less necessary it might be. She has to wonder if that isn't some small part of why Clarke is holding back on sharing her memories of this place: some things that are difficult enough to bear alone are all the harder to show to others. Vulnerability can be excruciating.]

Mm. Lotus eaters.

[There's a strange lurch of pain, of loss -- she'd said it without thinking. She remembers when the books had come, remembers Abel bringing them up to her room. Sounding the words out. It was a small mercy that he'd already left by the time she reached The Iliad, that name on the cover. Homer. This is an even older recollection: she'd read The Odyssey in high school, when she'd been an unwilling lotus eater in her own way, trying to exist in the world through the haze of antipsychotics.

She can still recall the shapes of those words, flowing under her hands. Homer's wine-dark sea. Her own fingertips brushing against those of rosy-fingered dawn. It feels like it happened to someone else.]

I don't know, maybe it is turning away.

[She doesn't sound -- or feel -- certain of that, but she's not entirely sure how to put to words what she does think. For a time, then, a thoughtful silence. OA keeps easy pace with Clarke, gaze raking the façades of the buildings as they pass. Hollow, false, like a film set.]

Common ground sounds more like the other answer. Reaching out. Asking for help. I don't mean that you need it--

[The last sounds like an afterthought, a concession. OA doesn't think there's any shame in asking for help, but she knows how absolutely unfathomable that is to some people, through no fault of their own. She doesn't imagine Clarke is one of them, but in the interest of avoiding insult, she specifies.]

--I mean that the fact we can endure something on our own doesn't mean we have to. Maybe that is why we're here.

[A beat, and then, less to clarify the thought than to add to it:]

I can take it, if it would help you for someone to know.

[strove]

[Almost immediately, Clarke's head begins to shake. By now, she knows that she can't take away someone else's pain, can't trick herself into believing it all comes with her because she escapes into solitude. She's not the foolish and broken girl she once was. If anything, it was the City of Light that led her to that choice. Should she open up and share? Would that help?

Even if it were Bellamy beside her, she's not certain she could. In reality, her memory of this place is vivid still. Bellamy held on to her hand in the real world. Bellamy kept her grounded, only letting go when he needed to go man defenses. Clarke was too far away at the time to know the difference anyway. And in her vision, she saw Lexa.]

It's not that I don't think you can handle it. I'm just—I've been training to be a doctor since I was old enough to, and there's something inside me that rejects the very idea of passing on that kind of pain. [That's not all of it.] I'm speaking biological pain. I had an object not unlike our neural implants in my head that was trying to kill me, and I had a substance injected into me constantly to make sure that it didn't succeed. The line between one and the other ... [Clarke can't even remember the actual physical pain. Seizing. Unable to keep going. It's like an echo of a memory.]

Maybe common ground is wrong, though.

[A flicker of a face, proud and regal. It's sent through their link, but nothing more. Her time with Lexa was precious. Though Markus had spoken to her at length in Clarke's dreamscape, it wasn't really her. And he couldn't really see their time together.]

That room was the audience chamber for someone named Lexa. I first began to fall in love with her there, and this is where I said good-bye.

[The link between the two. Strange, most likely.

But OA could tell that she was lying. Clarke will pull away some of the layers to reveal the truth. It's far more difficult for her than it appears to be for OA.

Or perhaps that's the subject matter.]

[hierophante]

[OA has had the dubious benefit of time to think. Years of stagnation, of near-total isolation, with nothing to do but truth-telling. She'd had to put herself under the microscope. Survival had depended upon trust, upon transparency, upon being nothing more or less than what she was. It makes her ill-suited for the world. This world, any world. She's for other things.

Things like this, perhaps: like taking what she's given and finding something like understanding. Some things are difficult enough to acknowledge, much less speak aloud. OA can't ask for more. She does give Clarke's hand another gentle squeeze, shares her own sensation of loss, a sympathetic echo.]

Someone--

[She catches herself. This should be a fair exchange.]

Homer.

[The flood of feeling says more than she could with words: love and loneliness, loss, yearning, anger, frustration, grief, the profoundest gratitude. Being without any of the others is like missing parts of herself, but this is particularly true of Homer.

All her memories of him are wrapped in hurtful context. She doesn't want to do him the disservice of giving too much, not yet. He deserves to be shared with joy, and so her own response is nearly as sparse: the face of a young man, staring down at her through a pane of glass speckled with condensation, his lips parted and his brow furrowed, eyes wide with hope, the tension of a moment of joyful revelation at the knowledge that for a moment they share only wordlessly: she is seeing Homer Roberts for the first time.

OA's chest tightens; she swallows the sensation away.]

Homer used to say that knowledge is only a rumour until it lives in the body. You don't really know a thing until the body knows it. Love is easy; it's here.

[The hand not holding Clarke's comes up to indicate not just her heart but lower, the gut, the groin. It's a visceral thing.]

I don't think it easily houses goodbyes. We... we stick, like catching on thorns. We come back to these places -- in dreams, in memories. It's like... I don't know, like some part of us can't reconcile what the body knows and what it can't... stomach.

[A pause, low mourning -- for herself, for Clarke.]

Can I ask what kind of goodbye it was?

[There are farewells and farewells, deaths and deaths.]

[strove]

The one she deserved.

[Lexa was a hero. A leader, the Commander of her people. She was a symbol, meant to die in battle carrying out violence and revenge against anyone who would hurt her people. She was strong in conviction and pride, a visionary in every way. But when that took her too far, she was killed: a bullet to her stomach, hitting a vital artery. Clarke wasn't able to perform any kind of surgery to save her, and saw her life quickly slip from her no matter how hard she tried.

There's an image of Lexa on a bed, dying, with black blood around her mouth. The memory here is clear: there is no confusion about the blood. It is black, as it should be. There is a wound on Lexa's torso, clear. Clarke is younger, wearing hair extensions and in tears. That was the first time Clarke let go of Lexa.]

When I came here and was sick and dying because I wasn't supposed to be here as I was, she manifested as a part of that technology and came to rescue me. She held off our enemies so that I could free my people from a lifetime without pain. It's the way she should have gone. [The way they should have parted.

The sky overhead grows dark suddenly, but it feels less like a problem, and more like a chance for the street lights to come on and show them a way. The lights come together instinctively, casting a path into darkness. This is away from where green would have erupted from the ground, instead undoubtedly toward Clarke's subconscious subway station.

She follows it, seeming to respect and understand what her mind is doing. Sending her symbols, just as Becca had done.]

Lexa lives on in that technology, and helps the current commander now. My daughter Madi.

[If this is strange in any way, Clarke doesn't seem to give any hint of it. Speaking of Madi, of Lexa—there is a great deal of grief and sadness. Clarke loves the both of them more than she's ever loved anyone else. Knowing that Lexa is there for Madi offers her some peace, but she loves Madi ... and misses her.]

I guess in that way, being in the throne room was settling because it wasn't destroyed. That's a place of the past that should be gone. Easier to act as if I don't mourn her every day. [But she does. OA can feel it clearly. Distinctly.]

[hierophante]

[Darkness falls like a blanket, like a shroud. OA finds strange comfort in it, in the street lights blinking on, reflecting off the impassive faces of the buildings in arcane constellations. It's a suitable place for the story, for the memory.

OA does not shy from death. It unfolds before her in Clarke's memory and what she feels is not repulsion or fear but recognition. Sad, yes. Lonely, yes. Familiar, though. An old friend. A thing of horror and potential. She sees it happening every day here, sometimes swiftly, sometimes protracted. She sits with the dying. She speaks to them, helps them grapple with inevitability, with the process, with the outcomes.

Sometimes she tells them a secret: that she is personally, intimately familiar with death.

As Clarke speaks, as she spins the tale, counted out by their footfalls, a tension begins to grow in her -- the tension of uncertainty, of knowing a choice lies before her. She knows what decision she'd make in a perfect world. None is.

The mention of a daughter drags her back from that introspective swamp. She glances sharply over at Clarke, who looks far too young to have a daughter, much less one of an age to be commanding anything. The surprise falls away to acceptance, to the beginnings of a decision.]

She's with you.

[Quiet, certain.]

Every decision you made for her that lead you to now, everything she taught you about living, everything that changed you -- they're all still here, part of you.

[So they come to the city and night falls and they are drawn inexorably towards its darkened underbelly. OA feels a flush of guilt. There's something she should say, something she should share, but the very thought is mortifying. It's desperately private. She's spoken about it, but speaking leaves a room for abstraction that what she's about to offer will strip away.

But she has a daughter. That sways OA.]

If it's death we're walking into, you should know: I can show you.

[She gives Clarke another look, absolutely solemn. Unearthly solemn. This is a great mystery, and it's one into which Clarke has to want to be inducted. OA herself had had no choice. She'd learned it young. It had shaped her, made her strange. She carries that strangeness now, wears it openly.

She can't force that on another person, but maybe... maybe walking into it knowing, with the distance of old memory, would make it easier to bear.]

What it's like. What happens after. I remember everything. But you have to want it.

[strove]

["I was supposed to die once." It's the echo of a thought: not a memory, not a moment. It's where Clarke's mind goes. Josephine had chided her for her inability to give up for once. Her need to survive had been used against her. Clarke had been changed, forced to see it as a failure on her part. It was selfish to want to live.

Josephine was wrong.

Before that offer, though—

When OA mentions that Lexa is with her, Clarke smiles. It's distant and bittersweet. Clarke's eyes turn glossy, because even if she's in a dream, she can cry as easily as she can in reality. Here, or even there most of the time, it's not an overwhelming feeling. As much as Clarke thinks with her head over her heart most of the time, she feels a lot. It's just how well that she manages to ignore her emotions that cripples her a lot of the time.

OA is right. Even without knowing Lexa or how Lexa reached her through Madi, she is right. Clarke learned so much from her short time with Lexa. She learned that the stolen moments are allowed. Her time with Madi had been six years. And when she was jarred out of it, Clarke lashed out. Loss marked her life over and over again. Loss defines Clarke more than she'd like. It's why she's Wanheda in every sense of it: the Commander of Death who can manage so many lives. She had hurt her friends to reclaim that time with Madi. She had claimed she did it because she was afraid of what would happen. It was all echoes of what she had lost before—most notably a long afternoon with Lexa, fingers at her back, asking her questions and hoping to get answers, intimacy, a time together. They were never even able to say that they loved each other when they both truly lived.

In all of that, Clarke's command over death seemed to mean she would never die. A cockroach, Murphy joked. And yet, she was a fighter. She couldn't give up even when she thought she had.

Is it wrong to be curious about death?

Perhaps.]

Show me. Your experience may not match how it is in my world, but I—I want to see it. [In her life, death meant a return to Eden, a return to a fantasy where she would eventually be burned away from Josephine's mind.]

You know, a friend of mine once declared that he saw hell when he had a near-death experience. I'm curious if it matches up.

[hierophante]

[So be it. OA nods slowly, giving Clarke's hand a gentle squeeze.]

It's never pleasant, but you don't need to be afraid.

[Perhaps saying as much is unnecessary for Clarke's sake, but she feels a need to do so anyway, to restate it as much for herself as anyone else. There's a brief deliberation -- which to show? Not the last, that lonely, empty space. Not the first, foggy with the distance of a childhood long left behind. The forest, then. The time it all changed.

She tugs the threads of memory, slipping underneath as into water, allowing it to flow.

Prairie lurches through the forest, arms extended in front of her, crashing through the carpet of dead leaves. This truly is a desperate escape: a blind woman, lost and alone, without her cane. Without anything. No road. Just the smell of earth, the bark of the trees into which she collides, the fallen branches over which she stumbles. Just her heart hammering in her chest, the air burning in lungs unaccustomed to its briskness.

The air changes. An updraft, the smell is different. She doesn't need to see the precipice to know it's there, that it's close. Prairie toes forward a step, another step, ready for the ground to fall away, ready--

The blow falls from nowhere, a sharp blossoming of pain across the base of her skull, and then nothing. Less than nothing. Less still than that. It happens mercifully fast, far too quickly to truly register.

When she comes to on a blanket of moss, all is light and colour, all is brighter than the memory of sky, greener than the memory of green. The landscape stretches on and on without trees, interrupted only by a little red hut. A bird flies by overhead, only it isn't a bird -- it's something whirring, robotic. Prairie watches it go. Watches. It's when she registers this without surprise, without any sensation but overwhelming calm, overwhelming peace, that she realises that for the second time in her life, she's dead.

The rest comes in bits and pieces, fragments of memory. OA is omitting sections, the most sensitive, the most strange.

Prairie pushes through the door of that little hut into space, into an endless expanse of swirling stars, tiny nebulae whirling past. She stands, walks, but there is no clear up and down, none of which frightens her. She has been here before. She knows: here, nothing is frightening.

She lays her head in Khatun's lap. The woman who had stolen Prairie's eyes welcomes her home like a daughter.

There is a door in space, and in that door a round window, like a porthole. Through it she sees her father, knows now and with finality that he truly is long dead. Khatun says that she can go to him, but if she does, she cannot return to the others. Khatun says that if she lives, she will never see him again. Not here, not anywhere. It isn't a fair choice. "To exist," Khatun intones, "is to survive unfair choices."

She says goodbye, the Russian heavy on her tongue, only half-familiar now. Papa doesn't hear her.

Prairie wakes. She wakes and opens her eyes and where once was blackness now there swims into painful focus the watchful eye of a camera; light filters in through the window, late afternoon, and she can see. She's alive. She carries Khatun's gift like a seed inside of her, a fluttering thing, promising freedom.

It fades; something of that peace lingers. OA remembers it well enough to feel it now, in spite of the tears she realises have come to her eyes.]

It was different for all of us. Different... spaces, dimensions. Stories. People.

[A beat, and then:]

I think you'll see her again. I don't think your deal is like mine.

[strove]

[There is some comfort in OA's words: It was different for all of us. Different... spaces, dimensions. Stories. People. Because when Clarke sees her idea of the afterlife, she can't help but reject what she sees. A life among the stars. A life where constellations are a place to land upon, rather than distantly making up the only sky she ever knew until she was almost eighteen. No, Clarke's idea of the afterlife wouldn't be anything birthed in that way.

What would it be?

Perhaps it would be little more than an abandoned gas station where she's hung her art. Perhaps it would simply be Eden, leaves crunching under her feet when the season turns from summer to fall. Perhaps it would be reclaiming North America here, knowing what that continent needs to survive because Clarke has seen it countless times before. Perhaps her afterlife is now, and she fights more for her people.

In that way, Clarke can't deny that she and Lexa may still be together. They saw eye to eye on what they would do for their people, and how they wouldn't steal private moments to themselves unless it proved necessary.

But she does reject what OA says. No, Clarke doesn't think she'll see her again. Hear from her. Miss her. Feel the tightening of her throat every time she thinks of her for far too long (now, that's happening right now).]

She's with Madi now. I'll see Madi again. [Better than saying "no, you're wrong," because it's hard to explain the intricacies of that situation. A memory doesn't show everything.]

My people left a version of this world seeking out a better one. Not the City of Light, but the world you saw outside. We ruined what little of it that remained, and went up into space. I think you're right that my version would be different as a result. I don't find comfort in ... the symbols of space. I don't want to return to the stars when I die.

[No. She wants to help her people find a place to call home.]

Coming here means I have a chance to find a better life. This world isn't perfect, but I will bring Madi here. And my mom, and my friends. And everyone I'm meant to protect. Some of them were Lexa's people once, and now they're mine. I would give a lot of things to see Lexa again, but what I want more is to find a proper place for my people to live. For our people to live. So that we can finally get our humanity back.

[A brief prayer of sorts finds its way into the connection between them:

In peace, may you leave this shore.
In love, may you find the next.
Safe passage on your travels, until our final journey to the ground.
May we meet again.

Clarke doesn't acknowledge this, but it seems as if she has given it to OA purposefully. The words themselves are an echo of many voices. Clarke's heard it her entire life, spoken by countless people. The last bit is spoken by Lexa alone with the track of a fading voice. Their people have never truly sought to meet again, only to continue on and be strong. That's what it's always meant.]

Strangely, I feel more sure of it after seeing ... after seeing what you just showed me. I can find comfort in knowing what I must do.

[hierophante]

[Clarke's certainty is gratifying. It isn't always harmless, isn't always gentle, but certainty is still preferable to the alternative. She cannot begin to guess at the repercussions of bringing more strangers to this world, but it would be a lie to say she wouldn't want to do the same in Clarke's shoes -- that she doesn't want to do the same, in a smaller, more personal way. She misses her own family desperately. If she could pluck them out of Hap's hands and bring them here, it would be difficult to resist, consequences be damned.

Either way, that certainty makes it easier to keep going, to move through this darkened dreamspace, into familiar, increasing sightlessness, interrupted by the scuffing of their shoes against the facsimile of pavement. The sound resonates in this strange space like that simple prayer resonates through OA's inner world.]

Homer's was a hospital, he said. Somewhere by the ocean, with foghorns. Scott's was a film set.

[She chuckles softly, ducking her head. It sounds absurd, the afterlife as a hospital, as a film set. It makes more sense given a bit of further context:]

The NDEs were just a way of... traveling, of moving temporarily between spaces. Dimensions. There are other spaces outside of those, we thought. Entire lives we might have lived.

[A beat.]

And other ways to travel. Permanent ones. Death isn't final, and it's only one method.

[There's a low mournfulness, an unspoken understanding: even knowing this, she cannot make manifest what Clarke wants. There is a way to open the path, yes, but want and will are inherent in the process. Even if the movements work here, which is far from guaranteed, to the best of her knowledge, she could only help people leave this world, not draw anyone to it.

There's another sadness there too, older and darker and far more personal.]

We were gonna have a garden. Homer and I, when we got out, when we found our perfect dimension. We thought there must be one, somewhere we could... live. Just live, with our hands in the dirt. I hope...

[A pause; she draws in a breath What she wants to say next must be felt, must be known in fullness, must be made true.]

I hope you get yours.

[strove]

[Everything about OA hangs in the air between them, and Clarke finally hits some point of understanding. Much of what she's referred to has been abstract in nature. Beyond Clarke's typical reach of conceptual understanding. It's not unlike when Loki speaks to her, and then talks down to her about her mortality. She can't help it then, is even fiercely defensive of how she sees things—and OA's approach, while different, is something she can't help but gather a larger understanding of until this moment.]

You've gone between worlds before. Dimensions, maybe. Different Earths. This isn't your first time.

[Had that been revealed through all of that? Clarke has a hard time discerning if that's true. What can be seen—or rather, understood, as that's more applicable here—of someone else's mind and experiences? From what she knows of Madi's training with the Flame, it's hard to deal with it when it's multiple people. What if it's one? She recalls Lexa meditating, but never asked at the time what it meant.

So much understanding that left her. That was never in her hands.

Clarke doesn't berate herself for it. She's curious, thoughtful.]

I've learned that there isn't a perfect world. But if there's one where my people can be left alone, that would be it now. I don't even know if this is the one, but ... [She thinks of the Red Sun sickness, of wanting to kill herself, knife mere inches from her arm to "cut away" at a cancer—]

Well, it has to be. Sometimes that's the place where you start your garden. [Monty had taught her as much.]

[hierophante]

[They're good words, apt words. OA nods, smiling -- easy affection for the wisdom and for its source, though there remains an undercurrent of remorse, regret for things outside of her control but still difficult to bear.]

Yeah. It was never going to be perfect for everybody, but we'd be free. At the time it sounded like the same thing, but we did spend more time talking about planting than harvesting.

[She looks down and away, for a moment unable to bear the sight of another person even in her periphery.]

We only traveled temporarily, only in death. That woman, Khatun -- the others met people like her, people who gave us... pieces, pieces of the puzzle, like words in a language. Five movements, at least five people. Executed perfectly and with perfect feeling, they could do things we could hardly imagine. The movements would be our wings. We'd get them all, and we'd learn them, and we'd escape.

[She huffs out a wry laugh; a pang of deep longing and regret passes between them.]

Sometimes we thought we were going mad. But the NDEs were real; we had proof. Hap had recordings. We had better. We'd lived it. We knew. We just... ran out of time. I didn't escape. There was no heroic rescue. I didn't save them. But I will.

[She presses her lips together, grim. It has the sound and feeling of a promise, a story she tells herself over and over so that in the telling it becomes real. There are worlds upon worlds, and time. They'll try again. She'll find them and they'll try again.]

I have them. All five. If you hold on to this memory and it still feels true in the sunlight, I can teach you. If you want to learn, find me.

[strove]

I'll remember. [The words come to her easily, solidified by a strong sense of certainty. Clarke would remember. There was no doubt in her mind about it. If she needed to, she would—her time in her mindspace spent fighting Josephine meant that she learned new ways to assert her determination. She wasn't going to get stuck without an answer. She would make something happen. Clarke is someone who would always try to move mountains if given the chance, the opportunity.

What OA is offering her is the skill to do that. It aligns with her other goals. Find a way to change and save the world. Make it a home for her and her people. Buy them a life away from politics, from worship and any consideration of all of that. Peace.

She wants so badly to be done fighting that Clarke knows that she'll jump at every opportunity that presents that outcome to her.]

You're OA, but that's not enough. How do I contact you? How do I find you? [Both pleading, but certain. Calm.

She'd remember.]