Chapter Text
She is left staring at the blood on the bed. The doors are open behind her, she can hear Titus walking away, her heart cradled in his arms broken and lifeless.
“Teik sadgeta stot au,” she hears him say, his voice thick and throaty with emotion, “Heda stedaun. May her spirit choose wisely!” Footsteps recede, and she knows she should follow, should run with Murphy while she has the chance, but her feet are rooted in place. Her eyes are glued to the black stain on the bed, stark against the white of her furs, that is all Titus has left behind.
The doors slam shut. Murphy behind her growls in frustration, jiggles the lock, but Clarke is still frozen in place. She can’t look away - she can’t look away because she still sees Lexa stretched across the bed, black blood leaking past the crease of her mouth, eyes dark with pain, wet with fear. Only the sound of their harsh, labored breathing breaks the still air around them. And Lexa is looking at her, face shadowed by the chance they almost had.
“In peace, may you leave the shore,” Clarke’s voice breaks over the words, they come out tattered whispers and she prays that Lexa can hear her, “in love, may you find the next.” It’s getting harder to breathe, but Lexa’s eyes are staring into her own and she knows she has to finish, because Lexa is counting on her, because Lexa needs her. “Safe passage on your travels,” Lexa’s eyes unfocus, and it hurts to keep going, because she knows how this will end, “until our final journey on the ground.”
Lexa looks at her again, and Clarke knows it’s for the last time. Her chin is trembling, and Clarke feels like a bullet has torn through her own chest. She chokes out the last words, and they come out mangled, broken, strangled, “may we meet again.”
A smile almost touches the corners of Lexa’s lips. She knows. She understands the almost that they had. She hears the ‘I love you’ Clarke’s goodbye almost says. And it breaks Clarke’s heart.
She feels Lexa’s breath, shallow and hot, on her mouth. She can almost feel Lexa’s mouth move with hers, can almost feel the slightest, gentlest murmur in return.
And then Clarke leans back. She looks at Lexa, but Lexa isn’t looking at her. Her eyes are half-lidded, glassy, vacant. She’s gone, and the warm breath Clarke had tasted on her lips she knows was Lexa’s last.
Murphy jiggles the lock and Lexa’s body is gone. The lungs from Clarke’s chest have disintegrated into nothing, and she’s still trying desperately to hold on to the last kiss Lexa breathed onto her lips but with nothing to hold it, it’s already gone too. Lexa was here , so real, so warm, and now all that is left is just black, staining once pristine white furs and choking in a loss that’s become all too familiar.
The cold seeps in past the blood-crusted fabric of her shirt. It sinks into her skin, meets the ice shuddering through her veins, and Clarke huddles in on herself against it. But when the cold is coming from inside and the only thing that could possibly bring warmth back into her bones is gone, it’s pointless. An act of instinct, of a mindless drive to survive.
Lexa’s last words to her echo in her ears. They ricochet through the muddled fog of her brain, spike fresh pain through her chest. The rough stone ledge she sits on digs uncomfortably into her skin, and her neck aches from the way it is twisted, head rested on her arms and tilted to stare out the window at the square in which they build Lexa’s funeral pyre.
“Clearly a lot’s happened while I was gone,” Murphy comments from somewhere deeper in the room. His voice grates on Clarke’s nerves. He sounds too uncaring, too casual, like they hadn’t just witnessed the end of the world and, regrettably, survived it. “Care to fill me in, Princess?”
Clarke ignores him. He’s been trying to pull her into one conversation or another all night, checking her pulse with words too carefully constructed to sound harsh and bitter and unaffected to be anything but. All night, they have been forgotten, locked in the room Lexa still haunts with memories too recent and too painful to bear. Clarke knows they are merely constructs of her overwhelmed and overburdened mind, but she thinks she must be a masochist because Lexa’s last smile and Lexa’s last kiss play out in front of her all over again.
No. Not quite playing out. They’re not quite memories. They’re something… more.
Clarke toys with the rough crust of dried blood caked along the seam of her pants idly. She thinks she should have crossed a threshold by now, some imaginary line in the sand. After her dad, after Wells, after Finn, she should be numb to the pain of losing the people she loves, of watching them die before her eyes, knowing that they are gone because of her. All she should feel now is empty, and it should be a relief.
Only, she’s not numb. Only, there’s a spiking agony breaking her heart in two, and it’s so intense it feels like she’s having a heart attack that just won’t kill her. Only, she wishes she could be so numb, because this hurt has turned her inside out and her heart into a mine-riddled battlefield and by the time the war is done it will be a black hole just sucking down every ounce of strength and energy she possesses until there is nothing left but the ghost of who she once was.
Lexa’s arm clasped with hers is warm, solid, strong. Clarke stares into the eyes of the woman she loves, hating that it’s goodbye - again - and wishing she cared little enough about everyone else to disappoint Octavia, to forsake her people, to take care of herself for a change. But her people are waiting for her, have been waiting for her for months, and Clarke has already disappointed them enough.
She sucks in a shallow breath, tastes the sharp, clean scent of the soap Lexa uses in her hair in the very back of her throat. A hard, thick lump rises there as she fights against the surge of memories and emotions it brings. There’s the old, hollow sadness staining Lexa’s expressive eyes, back again after weeks of being gone, after Clarke had forgotten that it had ever existed. And she can’t stop herself from leaning in, the ache in her chest to make that pain in Lexa’s eyes disappear so intense she can’t breathe around it. She can’t stop herself from reaching up to grip the back of Lexa’s head, can’t stop herself from pressing in and stealing Lexa’s lips in a long kiss…
It feels like dying when the kiss breaks, and she sees hot salt glide down the soft plane of Lexa’s cheek. It feels like agony, like a Lexa-shaped brand being burned into her soul, the way Lexa sobs into her lips, the way she shakes in her arms, the way she surrenders instantly, completely.
Clarke knows she’s loved the Commander for a long time. She knows that her pain when Lexa dies in a little over an hour will be inescapable. She also knows that making love to Lexa will only deepen the imprint the Commander has made in her heart, will only grow a kind of hope that is fragile and tenuous, but that will break her when it is ultimately eradicated by Lexa’s death. She struggles to change this moment, battles against the flutter in her stomach, against the warmth flooding between her legs, against the swell of her heart and the scream of bliss that swallows every shred of oxygen in her lungs and leaves her gasping.
She knows it’s not a memory because in her memory, she hadn’t feared Lexa’s death. It hadn’t even crossed her mind that the strong, resilient, powerful woman standing opposite from her could possibly die. Not like this. It’s not a memory she sees, feels, hears, as if it’s happening to her at that very moment.
Perhaps she’s just gone mad. Finally insane after all the pain this life has dealt her.
Murphy is staring at her. Clarke can feel his dark gaze boring into the top of her head as surely as she can feel the trickle of salt dripping across the bridge of her nose and the wide-open, hollow, haunted emptiness that is life without Lexa.
“What?” Clarke barks roughly. All she wants is to be allowed to grieve in peace. She wants to be left alone with these memories that are not memories, with these short moments of insanity that, though excruciating, bring her back to a time when Lexa still existed.
“Where are you?” Murphy asks, his voice unusually gentle. It’s so uncharacteristic, Clarke looks up to meet his stare, and finds that his brows are knitted into a tangled line and his mouth is twisted into a worried frown. His face is pale, his left eye swollen nearly shut, and despite having been clearly tortured - by Grounders, again - he has the human decency to care about someone other than himself. He still has the circumspection to know that not all grounders are the same, to accept easily and immediately that she cared about Lexa… and to be sensitive to it.
She wonders when he and Bellamy switched bodies.
Clarke sighs, swipes at the tears staining her cheeks and rubs at her arms in a futile attempt to bring a little bit of warmth back into them. “Not where,” she croaks back, “when.”
Murphy only nods, as if he understands, and finally looks away. He leans against the edge of the window, head tilted up to rest against the stone, and settles in, one foot propped up on the wide window-sill, his arm balanced across his knee. He says nothing else, and Clarke thinks that maybe he does understand. She thinks that maybe, if she knew something about Murphy other than the fact that he’s a bit of an asshole, it might not be so shocking.
It is a shock when Lexa kneels in front of her on both knees, in the same spot Clarke had knelt to her a mere few hours ago. It is a shock when Lexa stares up at her solemnly, and the words that pour out of her wind around Clarke like smoke, ethereal and untouchable, but real nonetheless.
“I swear fealty to you, Klark kom Skaikru,” Lexa’s voice is strong and steady, if quiet, “I vow to treat your needs as my own,” not so steady, Clarke realizes, as she hears the slightest tremor shake her words, “and your people as my people.”
Of all the shocking things that had happened in that day alone, this easily outmatches the rest. Lexa looks up at her, vulnerable in more ways than one, green eyes glittering dark in the candle-light. And Clarke thinks she hears more in Lexa’s vow than was said out loud. She thinks this is personal, that it runs deeper than alliances and politics. She thinks she sees the same glimmer in Lexa’s stare, the same openness in her expression as those she’d worn so plainly in Clarke’s room, staring at each other over the gleaming edge of a knife.
And seeing Lexa on her knees chips at something wedged deep in Clarke’s heart. She offers the Commander her hand to help her up, uncomfortable now to be the one standing while Lexa kneels prostrate before her. The way Lexa looks at it, the way she slides her fingers into Clarke’s palm, slowly and gingerly, as if afraid it might be snatched away, the way she allows Clarke to help her up…
This is real. This is standing in the Commander’s tent three months ago, staring at Lexa staring at her, mouth still tingling in the explosive aftermath of their stolen kiss. It’s terrifying. It’s exhilarating. Was this the point, Clarke wonders, that sealed Lexa’s fate? Could it have been this stolen handful of moments, under pale moonlight and swathed in the flickering orange glow of the army of candles ranged around the room, that decided Lexa’s death not a week later by the hand of her most trusted advisor?
‘No,’ the voice is neither Clarke’s, nor Lexa’s, though she feels it echo in the vast emptiness of her chest. She doesn’t give it much thought. She doesn’t give anything much thought, except to wonder when she will see Lexa again, which memory her broken mind will make her relive, with the knowledge of how all of it ends. It is a sweet, exquisite kind of torture, to experience with such utter clarity, with every sense finely tuned, the moments she shared with the woman she wishes she stopped denying she loves sooner.
“Clarke,” Murphy’s soft call catches Clarke’s attention. He stands beside the cracked door of her room, and the door is wedged slightly open. Beyond, Clarke can see the dark furs and leathers of Lexa’s guard - ‘No - not Lexa’s guard anymore’ - and the pale bald dome of Titus’s head. “He’s letting us go.”
Clarke scrapes the tears from her eyes. She doesn’t want to go. She doesn’t want to leave behind the room in which Lexa was last still breathing, still alive, still real . It feels too much like leaving this room, leaving the tower and leaving Polis, is leaving Lexa, and what’s left of her heart rebels.
“I promised Lexa I would keep you safe, Clarke,” Titus steps through the narrow gap in the door, hands clasped in front of him the way they always are. “The only way to keep that promise is to send you home, to your people.”
Hearing him say her name hurts. It chafes against her heart, burns under her skin, sears through her chest, because he pulled the trigger and Lexa is dead because of it. Clarke’s hands clench on either side of her, fingers fisting through blood-caked fabric until the dull pain of her nails digging into her palms distracts her from the rest. Murphy is watching her, concern evident in the lines across his battered face.
It is a strange thing to experience her body moving without her heart or mind agreeing to it. It’s as if strings pull her to obey, to gather her pack at the foot of her still blood-stained bed and settle the strap over her shoulder. It’s disorienting. But Clarke sees and feels herself moving through space, guided by some will other than her own, to find an escort of warriors outside the door.
The walk from the top of the Polis tower to the bottom comes to her in flashes, as if she is merely watching a badly preserved vid on the Ark before it crashed - choppy and incoherent. The elevator. The ground floor. People gathered at the door. A body-shaped sheet just the right size and shape as Lexa lying still on a table, surrounded by candles. Aden, staring at them as they troop past. It gets more and more garbled as they go along. Climbing atop her horse, the one she rode to Arkadia with Lexa beside her and Queen Nia in a box behind them both . The gates of Polis. The echo of sunset dim against the skyline, diluted and graying, as if in mourning. As if this world is too old, too tired. As if it has seen too many of its beloved die.
Her hands are shaking. They’d been steady only seconds before, but now, they’re quaking in defiance. Lexa doesn’t move away, doesn’t retaliate like Clarke knows she can. The edge of the knife bites into Lexa’s long, bare neck, but Lexa only holds still, only stares back at her, lips parted in silent, sad surprise. Between the two of them, Lexa is the more steady, the more calm, the more still. And it terrifies her.
Her stomach is in knots and her lungs aren’t working properly. Clarke’s heart is stammering in her chest, staggering under the weight of her fear and anger and hurt and something else that she can’t dare to label. Because there are no synonyms for the word ‘hurt’ that can come close to capturing how painful it would be to admit to that feeling.
She tightens her grip over the knife’s handle. A soft breath breaks from Lexa’s lips in the shape of ‘I’m sorry’, and their faces are so close Clarke can feel its warmth wash over her mouth and chin. Clarke’s throat betrays her, cracks under the pressure of the sob tightening it, under the aching lump corking it. Tears sting her eyes, she can feel them heavy on her eyelids, and she can no longer contain the twist in her lips or the tremble of her chin.
She pulls back the knife and pushes Lexa away, turning on her heel at once because she can’t fucking stand the way Lexa is staring at her. She can’t do it, can’t kill her. Because despite how much anger, how much betrayal, how much fear and that prickling, insistent pain she feels, she can’t force herself to hate Lexa. She just can’t stand to look into that passive face, with those expressive eyes so full of regret and compassion and a complete, genuine forgiveness Clarke knows she does not deserve.
The knife clatters to the floor, the sound of steel against stone jarring and loud, but not loud enough to drown out the jagged clamor of Clarke’s thoughts.
“I never meant to turn you into this,” Lexa’s voice is still soft, breathy, almost as if Lexa is talking to herself out loud. Clarke wishes she could peel herself out of her skin, because ‘ this’ is the skin of the monster that has grown over her like moss on a stone. ‘ This ’ is an overgrowth of steel around her raw, mangled heart and she’s tired of wearing it. She’s so tired… she wants to shed the title of Wanheda like a snake sheds its skin, and the assassination of the woman that had so easily stolen her heart before the mountain, and will so easily steal her heart again in the week to come, will only add layers of that title onto her shoulders. She is tired enough of losing the people she loves without losing another before being allowed to accept and express her feelings first. It is too much already that, when Lexa dies in a little over a week, it will be Clarke’s fault.
She doesn’t remember riding through the night, and doesn’t remember the dawn, but she is saddle sore when she looks around next. The soft morning is already upon them, sweet and crisp and light, as if it doesn’t know or doesn’t care that it should be gray in mourning. Murphy is studying her from where he sits on his own pony, both hands on the pommel and his seat a little awkward and uncomfortable, like he wants to get out of the saddle and rest but can’t bring himself to show that weakness. Clarke doesn’t bother to look at the armed warriors guiding them through the trees toward Arkadia. She just closes her eyes and slumps in the saddle, head pounding in her hands. A hot kind of pain is slicing through her skull and her eyes are burning and she feels so weary.
Her last flashback - though she’s not sure that’s quite the right word for what she’s experiencing - comes after they’ve arrived in the safety of Arkadia’s fence. Or - relative safety. Bellamy stares at her distrustfully as she rides through the gate with Murphy, and the hostile glares of her own people haunt her. It seems as if they see her as the enemy now, and she catches more than a few whispers behind her back, wondering if she needs to be locked away with the ‘others’ now. Even Raven looks at her askance. She knows the expression on Jaha’s face should worry her, but she’s too tired and sore and sad to care.
But Harper, Miller, Kane and her mom are here too, looking at her with concern rather than suspicion. Her mother’s arms encircle her, and the comfort Clarke finds in them is immense, but the storm raging in her chest only abates a little. She thinks she might have been safer in Polis, and she discovers later that night, she’s not wrong.
She’s almost asleep when she hears a scuffle at the door. Her mother’s arms are around her, the soft sound of Abby’s slow, even breathing soothing in the darkness. Kane’s rumpled form is slumped in a chair in the opposite corner of the room and Clarke sees him sit up suddenly at the scrape of something metal and heavy. Clarke sits up in the cot, and her mother starts awake too, bleary eyed and mumbling half-formed questions.
A sinister, yellow light slices through as the door slides open with a creak. Kane is on his feet, and Clarke scrambles to follow. Her heart is in her throat, and her head is screaming in pain, but she doesn’t think it’s from the noise. Shadows jump beneath the light, and it blinds her momentarily, before she sees that the shadows belong to a handful of people with murder in the faces, a strange, half-vacant, half-distracted look in their eyes. She recognizes them past the sharpening buzz cutting through her skull. Jaha and Jackson stand out among the rest.
It plays out like an old horror movie. Her mom reaching across her body protectively, Kane darting between them and the crowd advancing determinedly toward them, the first fist flying. It’s chaos. All Clarke hears is a sharp whine ricocheting between her ears, all she feels is a strange tug at the back of her neck, even as hands grab at her and a massive hammer flies in slow-motion to hit her right between the eyes… -
-… The sound of footsteps and shoving recede from behind her. Lexa is looking down at her again, expression thoughtful, but carefully constructed not to reveal anything else.
“What of Wanheda -?” Titus hasn’t the time to fully express his question before Lexa throws her hands dismissively in the air and growls, “Leave us!”
Her eyes hold fast to Lexa’s while the room empties out. Clarke thinks either Titus or Indra must have turned to challenge her order on their way past her and out the door, because Lexa looks up, lips tight with the barest rumor of a snarl, and glares.
“You heard me,” Lexa’s voice is steel, cold and hard. And then, as footfalls recede once again, “Sis em au na gyon op.”
Clarke twists to see two of Lexa’s guard approach to roughly pull her to her feet, and now she’s standing face to face, at eye level, with the woman who left her and her people for dead at the foot of Mount Weather. Clarke remembers the fury she felt twisting in her gut at this meeting. She remembers the hatred, rising like bile in her throat, the jagged, intense disgust crawling under her skin. It’s more intense now, but Clarke is more aware now than she was then that this rage and hatred and disgust are self-directed.
She watches as the hard veneer of the Commander falls away from Lexa’s face. Lexa’s fingers are gentle when she reaches up to peel away the gag from Clarke’s mouth. “I’m sorry,” Lexa’s voice is softer now, gentler, “but it had to be this way.” It’s a relief to be able to close her mouth. Clarke is keenly aware of the slackening of her skin around her lips, of the rage boiling over in her chest and the thick taste of her own spit in her mouth. She gathers it, rolls it with her tongue, unfazed by the taste of dirty cotton that rolls with it.
“I had to ensure Wanheda didn’t fall into the hands of the Ice Queen,” Lexa’s words are so gentle, and this time, Clarke can hear the true meaning behind them.
“War is brewing, Clarke.”
The spit in Clarke’s mouth is a thick, frothy glob.
“I need you.”
There is a sharp tug at the back of Clarke’s neck, and she flinches inwardly as a mouthful of spit flies into Lexa’s face. Color seems to be bleeding into the scene and time seems to skid for a moment, as if her brain is catching up. Hands collide with Clarke’s arms, and there’s a beat, a moment, where Clarke can feel her heart shuddering in place and the persistent, agonizing scream ricochets through her head . She can hear herself screaming profanities at Lexa, but the white noise that’s been slowly getting louder since Lexa’s death reaches a near deafening volume and -
Save her.
They’re dragging her out - she’s still screaming, because the white noise buzzing between her ears is splitting her skull open, - her feet catch against the stone and Lexa’s throne room, and Lexa, fall out of view, -
Save her!
Clarke is hyper-aware of the bad taste in her mouth, of hands clamped hard and tight and painful over her arms, and the words ‘ Save her!’ Tear through her brain like gunfire. Her throat is sore, her body aches, a thick layer of grime crawls over her skin and though Lexa is gone from her sight the memory keeps replaying which is strange, because what’s the point in reliving these memories if Lexa is not standing in front of her, within arm’s reach?
She stops screaming when the guards manage to drag her into her familiar room at the top of the tower in Polis. She drops to her ass on the rough flagstone floor, staring as the guards pull the doors shut heavily and she’s left alone. She’s left alone, and when Clarke stumbles to her knees, then her feet, she realizes something is different.
She’s in the driver’s seat. She’s in control. She’s not reliving the memory… Clarke lifts her hand, bunches her fingers into a fist, stares out across the room at the window and the now familiar scenery outside it and scrubs her hands through her tangled, filthy hair violently. She’s not reliving the memory… she’s somehow back in Polis. And somehow, Lexa is alive.