Project Iphigenia (Bellarke)

Chapter 9

Five Years After Start of Program

Death was both a clear and unclear idea upon the Ark.

On one hand, no one died of easily preventable things anymore. Medicine was almost at its peak, and with so few people on board, equal health care was a no brainer. No one tripped into streams and drowned or fell from trees and broke their spine. Things like that couldn't happen, so in some ways, many people were safer and lived longer. In this way, accidental deaths unless you were a builder or something akin, were only myths. So were deaths by things like cancer or other soul sucking diseases. In this way, it was unclear. Unless you were a doctor, you probably have never seen a dead body.

But the strict rules upon the Ark, capital punishment, also made it quite clear. Everyone knew someone somehow that had been floated. The very idea of death, that someone wasn't around anymore, wasn't a foreign topic even to children. Somewhere in the back of their minds, every child realized that likely one day they'd know someone who was floated, or even worse be there to see it happen or experience it themselves.

Yet, many of the children in the program were lucky enough to be spared of this for a time. Bellamy was arguably the most knowledgeable; as his mother had made it frighteningly obvious from the moment she realized she was pregnant with Octavia what would happen if anyone ever found out. She'd taken him close to an execution that day, and made him watch as Diana Sydney slammed her hand down on the button, sending a woman who had only forgotten to return a tool to the tool shed on accident, but it was still considered theft, into space. He didn't see her face as she froze to death while she gasped for breath, but he didn't need to. He knew he could never breathe a word of his mother's secret. He had to walk around with this weight everyday, and so the horrors of the Ark were not far away but very real.

It was five years into it when the reality of such things, of the smallest of errors and choices, could land you in the Skybox or floated...and it was, as always, a warning.

By the time Clarke was ten, she split her time between three places, it seemed. Quite a lot of her time was spent at school or the after school club; the older she got and the more casual it became, the more she wanted to be there. If she wasn't there, she was at home with a friend because she hated being alone. Sometimes it was a group, but often it was Raven, Bellamy, Wells, or someone else in her little clan. If she wasn't at either of those places, she was in the Medical Wing with her mom.

As a child, her intrigue had made the entire doctor team chuckle. While most children might be afraid of a heart lying on a table, when Clarke was five, she poked it a couple times (Before being scolded). It was then they realized that she had no fear of such gruesome things, and every doctor was trying to one-up the other by showing the Lead Doctor's daughter a weirder and grosser thing. She enjoyed this game.

But, beyond that, she listened and learned. While seeing someone's thumb bent completely the wrong way was sort of funny to her, she was equally as interested in seeing how they put it back to where it should have been. She absorbed every tidbit of information with vigor, and the joking soon turned that she was every bit as knowledgeable as the newly apprenticed kids just starting. She more than once had corrected a kid at least 8 years her senior on something medical when she was hanging around.

It was very clear to everywhere where Clarke would likely end up, and her mother couldn't be prouder.

Once, her dad got a little jealous and tried to take her to work with him the whole day. She'd never found anything more boring in her life.

But, as knowledgeable as Clarke was on many thing, she had yet to experience 'A Breakout', or at least fully understand it. They happened every five to seven years or so, she was two the last time one happened.