Chapter Text
"I never got a chance to thank you."
Clarke feels a strange mix of awkwardness and deep sadness as she watches the unconscious man before her. Her feelings about Marcus Kane have been many and wildly varied throughout her life, as far back as she can remember. In her childhood he was an intimidating, stern presence that commanded any room he entered (unless that room was already occupied by her mother, she thinks with a small, wry smile.) He gave off a general cold demeanour, his smiles few and fleeting whenever she saw her father manage to coax one from him. It still stuns her, knowing the man he is now, the sheer capacity of feeling that he kept hidden, suppressed, in order to do his job. She used to think him heartless, but Clarke knows now, all too well, the burden and sacrifice of making decisions in the name of survival. She understands having to do what needs to be done regardless of how she might feel about it, and knows now that Kane never took the loss of human life lightly. He carries the weight of every one taken, just as she does.
What was that old Earth idiom? Still waters run deep? No, she doesn't want to think of the Earth right now. She doesn't want to think about how, out of all of them, Earth changed Marcus Kane for the better, made him kinder, softer, more hopeful, rather than the way it has hardened Clarke and stripped her of her faith in humanity, in doing the right thing rather than the necessary thing.
She envies him that.
He is a good man, a good leader who sometimes reminds her of Lexa in his vision and drive to build a peaceful future for them all, not just his own people. And he loves her mother unquestionably and completely.
"I never thanked you for taking care of her when I couldn't be there."
She knows he'd have done it whether Clarke was there or not - as if anything but death could have possibly kept him away, she knows - but she feels like she needs to say it, to acknowledge it. They all went through hell down in that bunker, but her mother suffered an entirely different sort of her own creation too; fought an internal battle that wore her down from the inside out. Clarke only had a taste of what it was like to helplessly watch Abby struggle and it still lingers, bitter and sharp, like bile in the back of her throat. She can only imagine what it must have been like for Kane to watch the woman he loves slowly deteriorating before his very
eyes.
"I know you did everything you could -" Her voice catches, surprising herself. "Mom told me what you did, why you both ran from Octavia, how she thought -" Ah, that was why her throat was fast becoming clogged and her eyes burned. "How she thought she got you killed too."
Grief wells up uncontrollably within Clarke when she thinks about how Jake Griffin died over a hundred and thirty years ago, and, at this point, the only evidence that he ever existed at all lies in her, and the only other two people left that knew him: in her mother and Marcus Kane... Who are now basically married in all but official terms. It's all so tragically ridiculous that for a moment Clarke is afraid she's about to have a giggling fit at the bedside of a coma patient, which - because she's twisted and messed up - somehow just makes her want to laugh even more. She doesn't think Kane would mind, really; he'd probably just be glad to see her laugh. That promptly sobers her up.
"She's trying to save you now," She says, imploring, "You guys save each other; that's what you do." In truth, Clarke knows that in saving Kane, her mother is saving herself; Abby hasn't said it, of course she hasn't, but her hope would die with him. Clarke can't help but think about the overdose that may or may not have been an accident, relapse that - right now - would be all too easy and, worse, understandable. Her stomach feels leaden with cold dread.
"She told me..." Clarke knows Abby laid all the guilt on herself when she talked about the dark year; she knows because it's what she would have done too. "She told me that you know all the worst things about her and -" Her words become strained, "and that you love her anyway." Given his past she thinks that surely must go both ways: love unconditional. It's quite a thing to behold.
Somewhere deep down inside Clarke, a tiny glimmer of faith that she thought long extinguished resonates with the kind of power that love imbues, and she wills Marcus Kane to hold on with every fibre of her being.
"This isn't how this ends."