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Wanheda.
The first time he heard what they were calling Clarke, he ran it over his tongue for days, trying to taste every inch of the word and he couldn’t stop saying it. It was like a drug to him, one that hurt, but he couldn’t stop.
He understood, linguistically, why she was called as such. The Trisgedasleng wasn’t all too difficult to decipher, once one understood it was derived from modern English speak of the now extinct Creole people of the previous world had spoken, and he’d made his own translation. Their word for death was ‘Wanop’ or ‘wind up’, as in the souls going up to heaven and of course, ‘Heda’ which was leader. Leader of Death.
He also understood that she bore it alone, there wasn’t room for two Wanhedas, even though he had pulled the weight of the level with her. If she was going to be hunted and killed for what she’d done, for some crazed and barbaric ideals of power, then shouldn’t he too?
If anyone had bothered to ask him, which they should since he was fairly certain he knew Clarke better than some tree people, he would have given her a different name: Hecatonchir.
It was a Greek Myth, one he’d all but forgotten about until he met her. Once, he’d thought it apt to call the first generation of Grounders, those that sent themselves into the sky, this title. But oh, this myth summed up everything he knew about Clarke.
Hecatonchires were a group of Greek giants so powerful they could defeat the titans. They were said to have a hundred hands, and be the child of the earth and sky. They were forces of nature no one could deny, just like Clarke. Clarke was strong enough to beat the worst people they’d met her. Clarke was a child of the sky and the earth, equally adaptable in either place, and had the potential to become a legend wherever fate had them end up.
And her hands had a hundred uses. They were gentle, and motherly and kept a group of children left for dead alive, saved their bodies from mutilation, and sewed wounds shut as they thrashed in pain. Those hands fought endlessly for their lives. But those hands also killed an entire population of people that most didn’t deserve, killed the boy she thought she loved without hesitation, and the worst- those hands, with Clarke attached, had left them. Had left him. And he’d never wanted to hate someone as much as he wanted to hate her, but found himself unable to.
And when he held them, warm and shaking beneath his, he wanted to keep them with him forever, keep her too. Even as he clicked the metal of the handcuffs together, he somehow knew it couldn’t hold. Clarke was these giants, a force. She’d escape, somehow.
He sort of loved that about her.