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When she wakes up it no longer hurts. Not physically, anyway. Emotionally, Lexa feels a little bit like she’s been repeatedly attacked with a blunt sword – apparently dying does that to a person – but one glance down to her stomach is enough to tell her that the sticky black stain that spread across her front when the bullet entered her has disappeared. She touches the skin through the material of her shirt anyway, just to make sure, but there’s nothing, not even an inkling of her earlier pain.
As her fingertips brush over the area where the wound should be, it all comes flooding back. Her heart throbs painfully within her chest at the memory of Clarke standing over her dying body, hands applying pressure to her stomach, her face glistening with tears as she watches Lexa slowly slip away from her.
The tears sting in her own eyes and she tilts her head back as she tries to blink them away, unwilling even in death to show that weakness. A lump forms in her throat and she closes her eyes, wondering if she’s bound to this pain for the rest of eternity.
“She'll be here too, after a while.”
Lexa’s eyes startle open at the voice and she gets to her feet, only to see a familiar figure walking towards her, dressed in her usual furs and with the recognisable swagger in her step.
“Anya!”
The older woman nods her head in acknowledgement, the very corner of her lips pushing up into what is almost a smile.
“It’s good to see you again, little one.”
Lexa tries not to seem too eager as she walks towards Anya to close the gap between them until they are standing face to face. She lifts her head slightly, extending her neck so that she can look Anya directly in the eye, and feels Anya’s hand come up to rest on her shoulder.
“I’m proud of you, Lex,” says Anya.
Unable to get herself to do anything else, Lexa merely swallows thickly and nods, a soft frown tugging at the inner corners of her eyebrows as she tries to remain strong in front of her mentor, despite everything that has happened.
Anya lets out a sigh and drops her hand from Lexa’s shoulder, only to wrap both arms fully around Lexa to pull her into a tight hug against the familiar thick furs that Anya wears. Lexa freezes, her arms pressed awkwardly into her own sides as she tries to figure out how to reciprocate, until Anya’s words, soft and soothing, bring a long forgotten comfort that starts to fill the aching emptiness in her chest.
“Stop it,” Anya whispers into Lexa’s hair. “You’re here now. You don’t need to be strong here. Here there is nothing but love.”
“But…” starts Lexa.
Anya cuts her off, pre-empting the question.
“Shhh. You’re not weak, Lexa.”
“But love cost me my life,” Lexa points out.
“Loving Clarke, after everything, is probably the bravest thing you’ve ever done,” Anya runs her fingers through the soft curls that tumble down her back, and when Lexa closes her eyes, it is almost like she is a young Natblida again, being comforted by her mentor.
“It doesn’t feel like that,” confesses Lexa.
“I know,” Anya tells her, soothing Lexa with a hand that rubs gently up and down her spine.
“Is she going to be okay?” Lexa dares to ask the question that is haunting her mind.
Anya hesitates, which perhaps is more of an answer than the words that follow, then says, “She will be. One day.”
Lexa feels herself well up a little at the reminder of Clarke’s earlier promise of a someday in the future, a someday that was taken away from them in a flash of a bullet. Her eyes sting and a lump lodges itself in her throat, making it hard for her to breathe past it.
“We’re not alone,” Anya tells her suddenly, releasing Lexa from her embrace and nodding at the hazy horizon, where a shadowy figure is indeed beginning to emerge. The figure approaches slowly, gradually becoming less blurry as it does so, until Lexa can identify him as a man, and then in turn start to see his face in more detail.
He stops just in front of Lexa, close enough for her to see him properly, and she almost does a double take when she looks into his eyes. She doesn’t know this man, but she would never forget those eyes anywhere. They are the same eyes looked at her with hatred when she had Clarke brought to her tower in Polis, the same eyes that looked into her own with the utmost trust and devotion during their short time together in Lexa’s bed, the same eyes that wept as Lexa bled out from the wound on her stomach.
Straightening her spine and lifting her chin, Lexa tucks her hands behind her back and greets the newcomer with a nod.
“Mr Griffin?”
His face crinkles into a warm smile and he offers his hand out in the way that Skaikru do when they meet somebody.
“You can call me Jake,” he tells her. “And I just want to say thank you for looking after my daughter.”
Lexa nods, a frown on her face as she shakes his hand and corrects him, “Clarke is capable of looking after herself.”
“You taught Clarke what it’s like to love and be loved,” Jake tells her. “As I father, I can’t ask for anything more from my daughter’s choice of partner.”
Lexa doesn’t say anything at first – the lump in her throat does a pretty good job of ensuring that she physically can’t say anything – but she pushes past it, swallowing the pain and blinking away the tears that sting her eyes.
“I let her down,” she confesses, avoiding making any eye contact with Clarke’s father as she does so because she knows that looking into those eyes as she speaks will bring on uninhibited tears. “I promised her that I wouldn’t leave her again.”
“You didn’t leave her, Lexa.”
It’s not Jake who speaks, nor is it Anya, but instead a third voice from behind Lexa than sends chills down her spine, a voice that has haunted her throughout the years since she last heard it.
“Costia?”
Lexa places a hand on each side of Costia’s face, drinking it in. The last time she saw this face, the skin was sallow and bloody, her eyes cold and lifeless, her carelessly brought to Lexa’s bedchamber in an unmarked wooden crate. Lexa has been unable to rid herself of the memory, often finding herself startling into consciousness in the middle of the night after it make an appearance in her dreams, and she takes her time to drink in Costia’s features as they should be, warm and happy and full of the life that was taken from her so viciously.
“I’m so sorry,” Lexa breathes out, refusing to take her eyes off Costia for even a fraction of a second.
“Don’t be,” Costia answers. “I’m so proud of you, Lexa. Proud of what you’ve accomplished and who you’ve become.”
“What is this place?” Lexa asks, gesturing around to the void that surrounds them.
“This is where you come before you move onto the next life.”
“So I’m dead?” Lexa asks for confirmation.
“Not yet,” Costia tells her. “You’re in between life and death. You have a big decision to make. Do you move on and leave the land of the living behind you or do you return and face your demons? Do you slip away or do you hold on before it’s too late?”
Lexa is confused for just a moment. At first she doesn’t understand the choice that Costia is presenting her with. She was shot in the stomach, she felt herself slip away into unconsciousness, she took her last breath while Clarke stood over her pleading with her to stay. How can she return to that world when her life drained out of her slowly like the blood that soaked the front of her shirt?
Unless…
“Does everybody get this choice?”
“Only people who are truly special,” says Costia. Gesturing to Anya and Jake, who both move so that they are flanking Costia’s shoulders, she continues, “Lexa, if you’re ready to move on, we can take you with us. But if you want to go back, it’s not yet too late.”
Lexa reaches out for Costia’s hand and tangles their fingers together, squeezing them tightly as she refuses to let go.
“I don’t want to lose you again,” she pleads desperately.
“I’ll always be here,” Costia promises her. “I’ll always be waiting. If you choose to go back, you’ll return here again one day.” Costia brings their joined hands up to her mouth and presses a kiss to Lexa’s knuckle as she looks at Lexa with brown eyes that are full of trust and sincerity as she adds, “But Lexa, they need you right now. Without you, it will all fall into chaos. You’re the one holding everything together.”
“But Clarke…” Lexa starts.
“Clarke needs you. And I think there’s a part of you that needs her too.”
Lexa considers Costia’s words and slowly realises the truth in them. Though she doesn’t understand this strange new place she finds herself in, this temporary place of passing through, she can feel something deep within her chest that she knows belong to a connection that she has with Clarke in the world she’s leaving behind. And the feeling isn’t a nice one, it’s agonising, like a persistently dull ache as her heart slowly gets torn in two. She knows that it’s Clarke, and that understanding alone is almost enough to make the decision for her.
Lexa can’t imagine a life for herself without Clarke, but more than anything else, she doesn’t want to imagine Clarke suffering alone without her.
And so she realises what she has to do, even as the void around her and the people in it start to fade to white.
Lexa jolts to consciousness, the suddenness of the rasping breath that rips through her body forcing her into a semi-upright position, even with the heavy weight that lies across her chest. As she becomes aware of her surroundings, the familiar backdrop of her tower in Polis swimming into view, she realises that the weight is Clarke’s body, draped across Lexa’s body as she sobs desperately into Lexa’s shoulder.
Clarke’s head jerks up when Lexa’s body moves beneath her, puffy eyes and tear-stained cheeks looking down at Lexa as she gasps out her first few breaths following her otherworldly experience beyond life. The expression on Clarke’s face passes from one of confusion to one of wonder, finally settling on a dumbstruck combination of the two as she realises that girl that she had been starting to mourn hasn’t yet taken her final breath.
“Lexa!” she exclaims, a great heaving sob tearing through her entire body. “You were … you were gone!”
She launches herself at Lexa, arms wrapping around Lexa’s neck in a tight embrace whilst taking care not to put any pressure on the wound on Lexa’s stomach.
With even the barest minimum of movement hurting her entire body, Lexa moves her head ever so slightly, just enough so that her mouth is beside Clarke’s ear, and croaks out, “I’m not ever leaving you again.”