After years of hard work to get into the best college – or more precisely the one that her mom approves of the most, which is basically the same thing, since Clarke has been blessed with the good fortune of having Dr Abigail Griffen, Chief Neurosurgeon at Arkadia General and first consultant on call for tricky head cases for most of the region, as her mother - Clarke spends her mornings at college learning medicine, surgery techniques, and more medicine, her afternoons in the library studying medicine, and her evenings with Octavia in her apartment (also studying medicine.) Her schedule for this semester may be – is – hell in the mornings, but going over the new things she's learning consistently in the same day is doing wonders for her recall, even if the Krebs cycle is still a bit niggly. She beat Chemistry by sheer force of will once, and she'll do it again.

After particularly trying days, they often find themselves studying the positive effects of a good backrub – quid pro quo is the general rule of thumb - and takeout, and studiously not becoming acquainted with the dubious effects of alcohol, no matter how many parties there are on campus. (Well, not twice. They might have gotten away with it in high school, but eight am lectures are a different beast altogether. Especially if your last name happens to be Griffen and the lecturer has worked with your mother for years.)

Her weekends hold slightly less work, and Clarke spends her freer time with her family and, on her day off from her apprenticeship-slash-takeover at the local mechanics, Raven. Who does not follow Abby round like a puppy. At all. Because Raven Reyes is the coolest damn mechanic on the planet and does not have a thing for older women. Especially not Clarke's mom. Clarke is caught between teasing her and wanting to be the first pre-med student to develop human-safe brain bleach. her mom is her mom. She does mom things like burn lasagna and perform lifesaving surgeries. She is not a MILF, and is she hears that again she'll go for a certain someone's knees. She hasn't taken the Hippocratic oath yet.

As finals approach, life blurs into nothing but studying, a process helped by Octavia's brother helpfully filling every pocket in the apartment with snacks, to the point where they can't help but manage to eat despite everything. The fact that it allows Clarke to have eight hour straight study sessions helps tip it from creepily invasive to unexpectedly nice. His abs don't hurt at all either.

If she was asked about it, and if she had the time and was willing to reply to such an odd question without checking for signs of a concussion, she would answer that she thinks of herself as a normal, maybe slightly smarter than usual human if she listens to what her teachers have to say (those who don't work with her mother, at least, can be thought of as unbiased,) passably attractive (although that may have been her boobs. They had their own gravitational force, especially on eyes,) and reasonably tall. Not at all short. And she would be telling the truth, as she knew it.

As a result – the old adage of garbage in, garbage out held as true as it usually did, in life as in science – she is completely unaware of all the reasons she's more likely to be targeted by unscrupulous individuals who have figured out her secret.

Which is why being snatched on her way home takes her completely by surprise. Any kidnappings that might, potentially, happen in her life were mentally relegated to a few years in the future, when she was in some war-torn region with the Doctors Without Borders. And even then she's sure she'd manage to end up an indispensable part of whatever group needs her services, so that's not too bad, is it? But before then, she has exams she needs to pass before she can even hope to start her residency, and her residency to complete before she becomes a proper doctor. What she needs to do – and manages to concentrate nearly all her energy on, to her mother's vocal approval – is study.

Clarke has just decided, as she's heading home for the weekend after a long study session at the library, that she is going to open no more books - none books, left read - until her first exam starts on Monday – okay, maybe she'll let herself crack open her notes on Sunday afternoon, but definitely not a minute before then – when she hears a scuff on the pavement behind her. She makes sure that she turns slowly, without any sudden movements, because if it's the library cat she doesn't want it to startle, not when she's spent so long getting it to tolerate her presence - but before she can finish turning there's suddenly something on her face – she gasps in shocked surprise, tasting something vaguely chemical and everything goes fuzzier than the name of the second stage of mitosis.

She dreams of falling. She dreams of floating endlessly down, pillowed by velvet darkness as she is enveloped, swallowed up by ebony ooze. Everything is vaguely sweet, like perfume. Clarke dreams of mitochondria in meltdown, alarms silently blaring while nuclear sludge overflows and corrodes. She dreams of flying. She dreams of nothing.

Clarke doesn't realise what's happened to her, at first.

She wakes on a bed, stays awake long enough to note that she's not on a desk, and that she hears no alarm, and goes right back to sleep without bothering to wonder if it's a good idea.

It's not the first time she's done that, nor the first that she later regretted it, but with only the most tenuous grasp on consciousness sleep is too tempting a state to resist slipping back into. It's – very probably – the weekend. What's the harm in a few more minutes?

She wakes again to diffuse white sunlight. Through her eyelashes, it looks sort of like all the heavens are in the movies. There's a lot less dogs though. It's also quiet. Very quiet. Far too quiet for it to be a Saturday morning. Unless it's not Saturday. The jolt of adrenaline that rushes through her banishes the last dissipating remnants of her torpor, enough to send her knee reflexively into the wall. Ow. Her mouth is too dry to swear, and her throat isn't much better.

She frowns, one hand going down to rub some feeling back into her aching knee, and rolls over gently, sheets crinkling beneath her as she does. A dull headache pounds behind her eyes. She's overslept.

She's overslept, and she's woken up in someone else's bed.

Clarke is lying on a mattress on the floor. Besides her, it's the only thing in the room. From what she can tell, it's a small enough space – if she was lying across it she could probably touch both walls at once. Clarke doesn't recognise the shape of the room – generally rectangular with a slight indent for the bed she's on in one of the longer walls – anymore than she did the wall her knee has just encountered.

The walls are all a single shade of off-white, almost medical but too bright to belong in any hospital. There are windows across the wall to her feet, higher than she can jump, and if she rolls over a bit more she can see the door.

Her foot brushes against the wall as she moves. It's cold. Her shoes are gone. So is her jacket, her keys, her phone. She still has her top on, and her jeans, but her pockets have been cleaned out. Whoever did this even took the hair ties she keeps round her wrist. There's a cuff, about as wide across as the width of her hand wrapped around her wrist in their place. It's pliable enough when she pokes at it, with a dull metallic sheen that makes her think of oil. She can't get it off, or work her fingers under it, or tear it with her teeth, so she gives up on that for now. It tastes metallic as it looks, like she's been sucking copper. She hasn't done that since she was a child. Not since her mother took the time out of her busy schedule to sit her down for a discussion on heavy metal poisoning, and her father ... her father had built her a ph tester for the garden when she'd practically stopped eating for fear of metal in the soil. She still has that kit, she thinks, hidden somewhere in the attic, and the aversion to the taste of blood has yet to go away either. Clarke guesses she's just a sucker for holding onto things.

She rolls to her feet, knees giving way only slightly as she does, to approach the door. It looks like the entrance to a horse stall, long enough to fit three people walking side by side. Clarke doesn't much like horses. They're beautiful, but they're so big. Too big.

The top third, where there should be empty air – or would, if this was a stable, Clarke is fairly convinced that it isn't – is filled with bars. Like the windows. No glass, but the gaps are too narrow to fit her shoulders through, even if she could pull herself up, since she's done ever so many pull ups since starting college. The lack of mandatory PE classes had seemed like a blessing, at the time.

The door doesn't open when she tries it, but she doesn't give up hope immediately. It doesn't move left, and it doesn't move right. Doesn't lift. Either it's locked – and it probably is, given the whole kidnapping set up - or Clarke is way weaker than she thought and Bellamy might actually have a point with his talk of going to the gym, or one of the walls is the door and the door is some kind of trick. Which would be about the amount of BS she's come to expect from today.

Thoroughly fed up with the direction her life seems to have taken, she impulsively tries kicking it. Because there's absolutely no way that's going to go wrong. Her foot connects hard. No result other than a dull thud as the door rocks back slightly and a hurt, hopefully not broken foot. She hops back to the bed to think, trying not to curse. Not that anyone can hear her, but it's a bad habit to get into. She wants to do at least one rotation in a children's ward without getting lynched.

Fact one – the last thing she remembers she was on campus. Now she is locked in a room. That is not a good thing.

Fact two – when she had been walking, it was dark. There's sunlight streaming through the windows. A minimum of ... six? Six sounds about right, so - six hours to sunrise from when she signed out of the library, and another handful for the sun to get as high as it is now. She's missing a good chunk of time. Someone will have noticed she's missing. She just needs to wait.

Fact three – this mattress isn't the most comfortable. Slightly too firm for her tastes, and far too crinkly. The sun is in her eyes too. That's just great. Moving into the corner furthest from the door only helps a little.

Fact four – She couldn't have gotten here on her own. Even if she had, she wouldn't have locked herself in or changed her clothes. Which means someone else brought her and undressed her and locked her in a room and is probably after her organs. She shivers.

The first time they open the door is the first of only two attempts Clarke makes to escape during the entirety of her time in captivity. She's half dozed off again in the sunlight, for lack of anything better to do, (in her defence it is both finals weak and very quiet and panicking doesn't do anything), when footsteps catch her attention and the rattle of the door moving brings her awake.

She makes it out the door when it's only halfway open, swinging wide round the group – four or five of them, but she's too busy accelerating to take a good look - or maybe they let her get past, because they don't move at all, even when she's within arms length of at least two of them. Clarke only manages two meters at most along the corridor – pale wood panelling extending in both directions until the corridor turns sharply – the equivalent of one nth of the small intestine – when every muscle in her body burns and seizes and locks and she drops face first on the floor. She hadn't been moving fast enough to skid, but the floor polish is definitely being worn thin.

They pick her up without bothering to get her upright and drop her on the bed facing the wall. The hair on the back of her neck, already upright and slightly charred, straightens another fifteen degrees. She can't see what they're doing. Can't move. All she can do is strain her ears and listen to the movement behind her.

She hadn't looked – that was stupid, stupid of her not to look – but the glimpses she caught had been enough to know they're big, strong and able to lift her without breaking a sweat. She knows enough from the Blake siblings enthusiastic self defence lessons to know that you didn't need strength to hurt someone who can't move, but it doesn't hurt their chances.

Despite how tightly she is wound, she still manages to tense further at sudden clatter as a - is it a tray? With plates? – As something is put on the ground. She hopes its plates. For all she knows, it could be knives, rows of scalpels and all sorts of instruments that – nope. Not going there. Her organs are staying nice and safe inside her. Her breathing is quick and high, skirting the edge of hyperventilation by sheer force of will.

So plates. China. A teapot, even. She always though the idea of tea was fancy. She probably got the idea from rainy weekend afternoons watching tapes at her grandmothers, and the fancy pot with flowers and a gold rim Clarke had to use both hands to lift and pour.

Nothing happens. The clatter settles. Slowly, the din in her ears quiets and she can hear footsteps getting fainter, and the sound of the door closing with a quite thud against the wall. Then silence, broken only by the rustle and creak as the mattress is disturbed by her shaking.

Safe. She's safe.

Her body remains unresponsive. She can twitch, but no more than that. Her shoulder aches where she hit the floor. Being dropped on the mattress didn't hurt, but it does mean the only thing she can see is the wall. It's just as plain as the rest of the room. Things are slightly better now that she's alone and not in immediate danger of getting her ribs kicked in, but she's dying with curiosity to see what was dropped.

Okay then. That ... didn't work. What next? Well, there's nothing she can actually do, so she has to wait for the effects of the taser to wear off. Tasers work by … electrical disruption of signals to muscles. So the side effects would be … well, obviously, sore muscles. Maybe some tearing too. And possible cardiac arrhythmia. Which is not the greatest set of consequences to have hanging over her head while locked in a room who knows where, but there's nothing Clarke can do about it. If she feels like she' having a heart attack she'll just call herself up an ambulance. Right.

She closes her eyes. Tries to relax and counts one Mississippi two Mississippi three Mississippi four Mississippi five Mississippi six Mississippi seven Mississippi eight Mississippi nine Mississippi ten. Blinks at the wall, stretches to see if she can feel any improvement yet. And there is. She can move her jaw. Relaxes as soon as she can open her mouth. Breathing is easier. Her fingers also have some movement now. Not much, but it's a start. Once she's back on her feet she'll figure everything out. For now, she just has to wait. Wait, and … if she rocks like this she can flip over onto her back like so. Much better. Not that she could really tell the difference between pins and needles and electrocution just yet, but it's a start. Clarke settles and goes back to counting.

One Mississippi two Mississippi three Mississippi four Mississippi fi –

Weight. On top of her. And a line of cold by her neck that does a very good job of suggesting sharp directly to her hindbrain.

Clarke's eyes fly open to find a face inches from her own. The metal trails up her throat, the soft rasp of it against her skin almost enough to make Clarke shiver.

Brown eyes.

"I am Ontari Komazgada." The knife moves up along her jaw line, between the bone and the meat of her throat. Clarke forces herself still, stiller than ice, stiller than stone, stiller than anything that she can think of right this instant while her heart jackrabbits away and her lungs seem to freeze. If – when - she gets out of here, she's taking up yoga. Or free diving. Anything to learn how not to breathe.

"If you make an attempt to escape again, I will slit your throat."

The blade is removed. That should make her feel better – and it does, a little bit, because she can breathe again – but it doesn't. When it was against her skin, she'd known where it was. Now, it could be anywhere. Could catch her anywhere, even if they – Ontari and whoever else – seem to want her alive.

Clarke finds her tongue is loose enough to speak, even if the rest of her mouth feels uncoordinated and clumsy and metallic where her teeth caught at the soft parts. One more injury to add to her list.

"I don't -"

She doesn't move closer, doesn't move at all, but Ontari is suddenly so much more in her face, closer than even her dentist has ever been. She can feel the pressure of her breathing on her skin. If it were anyone else Clarke would think she was about to be kissed. And honestly, it has been a while, but ...

With Ontari, it's so much more likely that it's to bite her face off. Like she is a wolf, and Clarke is a rabbit that's wandered out of safety into her path, frozen out in the open.

"If you speak to me, I will string you up," her eyes fluttering shut, she inhales dreamily – as if Clarke needed any more reason to be terrified of her - "and you will wish I slit your throat."

Clarke can't nod for fear of cutting her own throat – and that's a phrases that niggles with familiarity at the back of her mind, even frozen in fear – but she manages a choked whimper of acknowledgement. Ontari holds it there, and Clarke's head with it, for a minute – a second, an hour? – then rolls back onto the balls of her feet and up. She can't be that tall. No matter how much she looks it.

Clarke follows her movement with her eyes as she swoops down to swipe a slice of apple from the tray on her way past. The way she snaps it with her teeth is ... something. Clarke's gone numb, passed through too many emotions too quickly to feel much of anything.

"Eat up."

The door clatters shut with an all too final sounding clang.