depth

i

She sits at the edge of the pool, shrouded in cool shadow. Knees tucked under her chin, toes just hovering above the blue. Not quite ready to dive in, obstructing herself from the cool relief. Instead, only her fingers lazily drift through the chlorine water. Looping patterns in infinity signs, allowing them to break and journey off but always return home; studying how the ripples spread out from the gentle motions that foretold them.

A bold smudge of paint adorns her index finger, still wet and fresh from her attempts to embellish her class assignment. When the water moves away from the streak, the paint follows, and a new image is created. Spreading out and swirling underneath waves Clarke makes, emerald filigree comes alive. Herself, alive.

Paint, pool. It's the most alive she's felt today.

The ripples are small, as are the waves. She lacks the courage to cause tides, though she knows she has the power. Her fingers plunge beneath the surface, more forceful strokes, to prove it to herself. See? She is the cause of change, and she will be changed by it. Just if she gives herself enough courage, to do the right thing.

She learned this at the tender age of 15 – she smiles at the memory swimming to the surface – after another elaborate prank was pulled off with major victories and minor consequences. She'd sulked in Principal Kane's office, Lexa prim and perfect next to her as they'd waited to be reprimanded. The quiet certainty from the brunette had pulled out from within Clarke a self-assured smirk.

(It had been justified, she'd known. Nobody could humiliate her friend and get away with it. She still stands firmly by that.)

Kane hadn't thought it was justified. "You're – you're such a force to be reckoned with, Clarke," he'd sighed to her during their one-on-one talk. (He should've known; he was her mom's new boyfriend.) For her part, Clarke had barely listened – until that bit. A hint of victory had been concealed behind the resignation, and she'd been eager to prise it free. "You can be a tsunami. There is so much within you. But that can be dangerous."

He'd watched her, again, as if he hadn't been for the past five minutes. Clarke had now stared back, defiant. "You've got to be careful."

Lexa had told her later (with no sense of the wounded pride Kane had expected of her) that his metaphor had been incorrect. There was reason for this; Lexa was the poster child for ascribing to logic, even back then.

Before a tsunami, the brunette revealed, comes an earthquake. Yet Clarke was a force within herself, because of herself. Murphy's humiliation of Wells could've been addressed a thousand different ways; Clarke had dealt with things her own way, because she could. Clarke wasn't Clarke because of other people – she may be influenced by them, but not altered to the point of never again knowing who she was. She was Clarke because of herself.

(At the time, Clarke had gazed back at Lexa and wondered how someone so young could bear the truths of a world she seemed to understand so deeply.)

Her high school years she'd survived with a confidence she'd struggled to secure at first. Back home for the summer, back home with memories swilling around her like droplets coloured green, she wonders where it's gone. If she can get it back somehow. Soon. She'd left for college almost shaking with it – now she's grasping for it, blinded by suffocating complacency.

Learning the essence of confidence is clearly not the same as equipping it.

There isn't much of a breeze this morning. Instead, the Californian summer offers blistering heat. She can feel herself burning. Clarke feels the blood boiling in her veins, sizzling the sweat on her forehead, under her arms, on the flesh of her chest. Quietly agitated – restless, but not yet listless – she tries to steady her mind by swirling patterns in the pool. Sapphire blue, emerald green. Beautiful colours. She wants to paint again.