Chapter Text
To want is what bodies do
And now we are ghost
- Marina Tsvetaeva, from "Poem of the End"
i
Her father's ghost shows up for the first time when her eighteenth birthday is less than five months away. She has already spent seven months in solitary and would think she's gone mad if it weren't for the fact that Jake Griffin isn't the first ghost to have ever appeared in front of her.
"Hi, dad," she greets him with a tremulous smile, after a moment of astonished silence. Her fingers are crossed by a slight spasm. She was portraying yet another impossible landscape on one of the walls. She doesn’t cry in seeing him. Why should she? Tears are meant for moments of despair. This is not and at the same time it is. She knows what it means that he is there with her and her chest seems too small to contain the boundless mass of her heart.
Her father smiles with the repentance of those who realize that they have done a wrongness to someone they loved and don’t know how to expiate it. Unlike her mother, he never refused her stories, excusing them first as childishness and then as oddities or a plea for attention. But he never really believed her, not until now.
"Hi, honey," he replies.
Clarke closes her eyes, the pencil slips from her loose grip, falling to the floor with a redundant noise.
She doesn’t know what she is feeling in discovering that she is her father's deepest regret.
***
Ghosts have been a constant in her life since she was five, or at least her first real memory of one of them dates to when she was five. She remembers an old lady with a haggard face and skinny hands, sad and kind eyes, with whom she pretended to have tea, who taught her the concept of perspective in the representation of space and the methods to perform it in her drawings.
For her father she always had a fervent imagination even as a child. Curious, precocious, brilliant, they have always said trying to define her.
And a freak, because of the ghosts, but nobody has ever had the courage to say it to her face. Not that there was a need. Cautious, wary, biased looks. Over the years Clarke got used to it. If a little girl finds priceless objects hidden from her ancestors for the "rainy days", shows how to turn on old equipment that even the engineers have forgotten how work, listens to voices that only she can hear and become their spokesperson for getting the regrets that hold them in the right hands, after a while the perplexity turns into a more cutting and cruel feeling. There is no understanding for those who are different or eccentric, for those who don’t follow pre-established schemes, those who don’t show the right attitudes, don’t fall into the system. There is no forgiveness for those who stand out in a pyramidal world in which everyone has a role, a specific place to occupy.
The girl grows up and the doubt in people’s eyes when they look at her becomes the barycenter of her insecurities and the driving force of her daring boldness, of her generosity, of her selflessness, of her pertinacious self-denial.
***
The first thing she notices about Bellamy Blake is not the sardonic smile or the provocative tone with which he speaks to her, let alone the derisive light while he eyes her from head to toe. No, the very first thing her gaze lingers on is the ghost of the woman behind him. She looks the age of her mother. She is tall, slim and as beautiful as an exhibition weapon can be. No matter how finely decorated the hilt and scabbard are, the blade is a lethal poison for the soul.
When Bellamy insists on opening the door and Clarke tries to stop him, the woman's eyes narrow dangerously. She sees her place a hand on her son's shoulder and repeat her own suggestion. After a moment of consideration Bellamy shakes his head and does the exact opposite of what she and his mother said. He opens the damned door.
From that moment, together with his son, Aurora Blake becomes the thorn in her side.
***
Ghosts come and go. Clarke has always been curious about where they go when they’re not with her, however she never expressed her interest out loud. She fears that it would be unwelcome and out of place.
***
Ghosts don't make her a better person but make her older and by sharing their experiences with her in the form of bedtime stories she grew up before her years. She knows secrets that she shouldn't be aware of and with the imaginative power of her mind she has been to places where she never set foot, sometimes she's part of history and reminiscences more than the present.
She realizes that she is different from the rest of the Delinquents. It was like that on the Ark too. Clarke is an anomaly. She always has been. On Earth, however, the differences thin out like shadows. Who cares that she gets information that no one else know about? That her insights are always mostly correct?
Ghosts are her eyes, her memory, her conscience.
She never went against their advice.
There is a first time for everything.
Not even five days have passed since they set foot on Earth and Wells has just tried to talk to her. Clarke pretended not to notice. Her father is with her and observes his retreat with incredibly sad eyes. "You should try to listen what he has to say."
Clarke continues to collect firewood. "I don't want to. I already know what he would say and I don't care."
"Sweetheart-"
"Do you think I want to hear his apology?" She interrupts him. "That I can forgive him for what he did? It's his fault if you're dead."
"I knew what I was doing. I knew the risks."
Of course, he knew. Her father always had a plan for everything and backup plans just in case. He was the man capable of repairing the unthinkable. The couple with miraculous hands, Wells called her parents jokingly. The woman who saved lives and the man who rebuilt from scratch with pieces of scrap.
Wells admired her father and despite this-
"He too," she replies. Her lips are chapped, her mouth dry. She is dehydrated. She squeezes the branches she has collected. "We all have to pay the price of our choices."
***
There are no regrets to hold back Atom. The boy slips into the Beyond like a shadow, his steps slow and sure, without delay. Whatever he is observing, his face is transfigured into an expression of pure and absolute joy.
"Thanks," he says, turning to look at her over his shoulder. He is smiling and the skin around his smile is smooth, not deformed by sores and burns.
Clarke sees him disappear. The blood on her hands is still warm, his eyes wide-open. The murmur of her voice echoes one last note before it breaks.
She closes his eyes with all the delicacy she manages to gather. Bellamy passes her water to clean her hands with a cryptic and intense expression. Neither says anything. Death is death. What's there to add? Any other word would be superfluous.
***
Finding out that it was her mother who betrayed her father and not Wells nearly destroys her. Then something changes and despair is replaced by a drastically different feeling. Anger resonates inside her body like a discordant, disdainful and immoderate melody. Her mother isn't the only one to whom it’s extended. She begins to walk away from the Dropship until the only discernible noise is her accelerated breathing. When she is sure to be completely alone, she screams. Kneeling, her hands sunk in the ground to claw anything in search of a hold, she screams until she has no breath in her lungs, until her throat burns as if she swallowed liquid fire.
When she turns her head towards her father, she is not the only one who has red eyes, wet cheeks.
"Why didn’t’ you tell me?" She whispers, each word a stab of suffering in her larynx.
"You had already lost a parent."
She nods, but it's meaningless. "So, I'm an orphan."
"Don't say that. Your mother-"
"She betrayed you," she says. She sees him back away from her gaze. Whatever expression is on her face it must be terrifying. Enough to make remorse dig out new wrinkles on her father's forehead and around his mouth. Good. Now that anger has also begun to wane, there is only desolation. Her mind is a trench. "She let them float you and send me into this hell."
"It was to offer you a better future. You are the last hope."
She knows what he's trying to do. It doesn't matter. There is no reason that holds, every belief collapse under the cruel weight of truth. There are unforgivable actions. She can rationally accept the motivations that prompted her mother to make that decision. She can as a leader, not as a daughter.
"It's as if she killed you. I don't care why she did it. I'll never forgive her. Never."
Never, ghosts have taught her, can be a very long time.
***
"Not like that or you'll prick yourself," Aurora says over her shoulder.
Clarke nods thoughtlessly and obviously it's the moment when Bellamy decides to sit next to her. Taken by surprise, she startles, and the needle pricks her finger.
"Be careful, princess or I might think I make you nervous."
She doesn’t raise the head but can practically feel his smirk in the dim light.
"What are you doing?"
She rolls her eyes. "Can’t you see?"
"If you're trying to sew that hole, you're doing a poor job," he comments and strangely his voice doesn't sound critical or offensive.
This convinces her to lay down her arms. She stops before pricking herself again and sighs, frowning at the work done so far. "Do you think I don't know?" The admission has a mortified sound to her own ears. It is so ridiculous. The whole thing is. That she can suture any type of wound, but it escapes her how sew a hole is humiliating, for one thing.
"Give it to me."
His gaze is heavy on her face and for the first time, without the belligerent expression he usually displays, the resemblance to the woman behind him becomes undeniable.
"What?"
Now it’s his turn to be bashful. "I said, give it to me."
She passes him the shirt without another word and looks at him as hypnotized. The needle moves with patience and precision.
"I learned from my mother," he says in a sort of explanation, as if he felt compelled to justify himself. "She was a seamstress."
Clarke glances behind her. Aurora is looking at her son, stiffened to the point of being one with the trunk of the tree.
"Was she good?"
Bellamy nods. His long fingers are fast, but his eyes are far away, lost in old memories which, judging by the tiny smile that he cannot suppress, must bring him enough joy to make him forget where he is, to who he is talking. "Enough that even those uptight women from Alpha Station lowered themselves and came to our door to ask her to make clothes and repair hems. Sometimes the requests were too many and there were days when her hands-" his voice breaks off and suddenly the spell is broken. She sees him blink and the remembrances stop whirling in his gaze. His face shutters, entrenching behind his favorite mask of cold cynicism and ostentatious contempt.
"Everything I know, she taught me," he concludes and shrugs. The boy has disappeared again, and Clarke misses him keenly. "Just like you are your father's daughter, princess, I am my mother's son."
Even if it’s in the shade, the expression on Aurora's face is one that Clarke will never forget.
***
"Wells?"
She sees him emerge from the thick of the woods and the smile dies on her lips. The moonlight passes through his body like a spider web covered in dew.
She feels numb. No, she thinks. No. No.
***
"It wasn't Murphy," says Wells.
Clarke stopped shaking, but the cold got wedged into her bones. Wells' body is less translucent and opalescent in the first light of dawn. The earth on his grave is still loose.
"Then who?" she asks. Whoever did it, will pay. She will take care of it if necessary.
"Who cares?"
Finally, she turns to look at him. Her best friend. A boy who had his whole life ahead of him, a future that was wretchedly torn from him. Whoever did it, deserves the ferocity of a punishment. It isn’t revenge, it’s justice.
"Whoever was, he's a murderer," she speaks slowly, relentlessly. "He killed you in cold blood, stabbing you in the back. He deserves to pay for the consequences of his actions."
Wells looks at her as if he sees her for the first time, as if he doesn't recognize her. "What happened to your compassion?"
Clarke bites her cheek, strong enough that the taste of blood invades her mouth, dirties her teeth. "It died with you."
***
"It wasn't Murphy!" she exclaims and the vehemence in her voice stops Bellamy's steps. The look he gives her is indecipherable, plants itself in her skull.
"How do you know?"
Clarke is silent.
***
"What happened? You died. I killed you. What-" Charlotte looks around and the panic in her wide eyes tinges the night like a nightmare. As if the horror of having just seen her jump from a cliff wasn’t enough, now her ghost is standing next to Wells'.
"It's all right," Wells reassures her, incredibly patient as he extends a hand towards her. "I was waiting for you."
After she and Bellamy have banished Murphy, after everyone has gone to their tent including Bellamy and Finn, Clarke remains behind and in the silence that surrounds her she approaches the two ghosts that followed them and are now sitting by the fire engaged in conversation, their heads pushed together as if they were confiding secrets. It is an oddly comforting image, so much that for a moment she chooses to overlook the fact that their bodies don’t cast shadows on the ground or on the strange glow of their skin, similar to that distant of the stars, to the dreamlike bioluminescence of the fireflies.
"Do you know what is holding you back?" Wells is saying. After the night they had, his calmness is a balm to the ears. "Your guilt. Forgive yourself and we can go on."
Charlotte frowns, the confusion she feels is evident. "I don't understand. Why are you so kind to me? I took everything from you."
"No, not everything." Wells shakes his head. "Just my future."
Clarke would like to laugh, instead finds herself struggling with sobs. Charlotte is the first to register her presence. "What will happen now?" she asks her.
"You can choose to stay," Clarke replies impulsively.
"What if I don't want to?"
Clarke smiles, but it's a painful smile. She is beginning to understand that gradually it is what everyone will do. Wells and Charlotte are only the first to choose to leave her, but sooner or later her father and Aurora and all those who still must come will do the same. What will become of the girl surrounded by ghosts then? What will remain beyond the chasm of their absence?
"You can choose to go on," she says because she can't lie to her, can't be consciously selfish trying to hold her back.
Charlotte appears heartened and responds to her smile with an uncertain one. Then she turns to Wells and her expression curls up, her voice trembles. "I'm sorry for what I did to you. I was scared and I just wanted the nightmares to disappear. Will you stay with me?"
"I promise," Wells says and his light seems more intense, clearer. He embraces Charlotte's and the night fades around them as if the colors had been diluted. When they begin to fade, she can hardly breath.
"Wells," she calls him, her voice broken by emotion, by the tears that wet her eyelashes and cheeks.
Wells looks at her and the peace in his eyes is the only detail she can focus on. "You are the best among us. You have always been. I will miss you."
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.
- Jane Hirshfield
ii
She wakes up and for a moment she thinks she died. Every sensation is tempered, the vivid white of the walls makes it difficult to keep her eyes open. She closes them and remembers. A ring of fire. Bellamy. Finn.
When she opens them again Aurora is bent over her, the only stain of color and life in the impersonal sterility of the room and if that is not an oxymoron.
She turns on her side, hides her face in the pillow. "Is he still alive?" she murmurs, her voice muffled by raw cotton fabric, hope something difficult to hide.
"I don’t know."
A heartbeat.
"Octavia?"
A slight hesitation. A cold and gentle stroke on the forehead. "Safe."
***
The insight collected by her father during his patrol confirms the fears she harbored. It seemed too good to be true.
"They are not what they seem to be," says Jake Griffin, pale as he has never even been in life, his hands clenched into fists and something, at the bottom of his unusually hard and steel blue eyes, makes her tremble with the fury that they contain, barely restrained.
"Be careful," he whispers when Dante enters the room. "Don't believe him."
He and Aurora are planted as two pillars next to her, each on her side. Her father squeezes her shoulder. Aurora touches her elbow. Light touches like butterfly wings, practically imperceptible.
You are not alone, it seems they are saying in their silent and quiet way. We are with you. You're not alone.
For the first time she feels like it may be true.
***
Finn's ghost doesn’t appear. That night Clarke doesn’t sleep. She doesn't know if what she feels is excruciating relief. Then she begins to see him everywhere.
"It's just an echo," Aurora explains. "Don't get used to it. He will disappear in a couple of days."
She thought that not seeing him was a punishment enough, now learns that there is always a way for things to get worse.
***
The ghost behind Lexa no longer avoids her gaze. Her eyes are gray-green, her hair has an amber tinge. Clarke finds out her name. Costia.
"Don't bother you to not be the first?"
Clarke shakes her head slightly. She has become efficient in carrying on conversations of this type, made of silences and gestures and micro-expressions.
No, it doesn't worry her. She wasn't it even for Finn. It didn't make her love him less intensely, didn't make her detest herself less for what she did to him.
After so many years, if there is a truth she has learned about ghosts, it is precisely that love represents their deepest regret.
With Lexa she also learns that it is a weakness.
***
"I know you don't approve," she says. They’re alone in the tent. She can't look Aurora in the eyes, afraid of what she will find there. Disappointment, most likely.
"I'll go with him," she hears her say after an interval of time that has seemed endless. Clarke jerks her head up. The half smile that arches Aurora's mouth is more familiar than her own reflection. Twin of what Bellamy used when he called her 'princess'. "He won't be alone."
She exhales a sigh that she hadn't realized she had held until then. "Thank you."
What she is thanking her for, though, she's not sure.
***
"My daughter could have died because of you. But in that case maybe my son wouldn't be here."
Clarke thinks back to the chorus of moans and screams, to the stench of burnt flesh, to the tide of ghosts dangling in the rubble of Tondc, to how her own parents started to look at her as if she were something repulsive, no longer the daughter they raised and loved, as if a stranger had usurped her place.
Thinking about what she has done doesn’t make her sleep. It was necessary and she would do it again, especially considering the alternative. This doesn't make it any less wrong. Regardless of the mission and what it entails to save those who remain of the hundred from Mount Weather, Bellamy's life shouldn’t be worth more than that of hundreds of strangers. It isn’t healthy. The reality of the situation doesn’t change. To her he is. Bellamy is more important.
"He won't forgive me easily," she says.
Especially when he will find out that she endangered Octavia's life.
"Forgiveness doesn't have to be easy," Aurora replies, as relentless as the passage of time, "otherwise our sins would stop bearing the slightest weight."
***
Dante is not the first person she kills. The dead of Tondc weigh on her conscience like the stone of Sisyphus.
And now this.
"Are you sure about this?" Jake asks.
Her mother appears on the screen and her father doesn’t blink, concentrated as he is on her.
No, she isn't, but what choice does she have?
"You can't go back," he insists. "It will change you irreparably, it will mark you for life. You will never go back to be the person you were before. Are you ready to accept the weight of the deaths you will cause, their blood on your hands?"
Everything in her rejects what she is going to do, which she knows she must do.
"My sister, my responsibility," Bellamy says, approaching her and the lever. Aurora grimaces, as if a mortal blow had been struck her, but remains silent to observe in a corner, arms folded, without intervening. Solemn and stern, her figure is a point of dim light that screeches in the darkness that surrounds them.
"I have to save them," she replies to both, her father and Bellamy.
Her father nods and the resolution with which he looks at her, partly pride, partly grieve, breaks her heart. She has already seen that look. She already knows what he is going to tell her.
"Then you don't need me anymore."
Is this really the end?
Bellamy puts his hand over hers on the lever. "Together," he says.
"Together," she repeats. It sounds like a promise, like absolution.
Later, when the ghosts that inhabited Mount Weather begin to regroup above ground and disappear, she is there to watch. Jasper's recriminations still echo in her ears, every time she closes her eyes, she sees Maya's scarred face.
There are a multitude of men, women and children killed by radiation - by her -, hundreds of Grounders and Reapers. The meadow seems too small to hold them all. In the front row, ready to guide them, her father has regained his smile. Clarke starts breathing again. They are all there and in death there is no longer distinction between enemies and friends, between guilty and innocent. Death made them equal. For a moment the world fills with blazing light and spreads in the void as far as the eye can see, igniting the darkness of the night like an explosion, so much that Clarke is blinded by it and must cover her eyes, hide them behind the palms of her hands.
When the light goes out, the dream also dies out. The meadow turns back to being just a meadow, the dead go back to be the bodies that must be buried and the face of her father turns into the memory that has always been.
When she begins to cry, she collapses on the now deserted meadow, surrounded by the embrace of the suddenly overwhelming sky. She has a thousand reasons to cry. She cries for Finn, for her father, for Maya, for Jasper and finally for herself, for the girl she was once and who no longer exists, buried under the weight of impossible choices, of the genocide she just perpetrated.
Il sole può tramontare e poi risorgere. Noi, invece, una volta che il nostro breve giorno si spegne, abbiamo davanti il sonno di una notte senza fine.
- Catullo
iii
The morning starts with the usual question. It has become a kind of ritual. After collecting her few belongings and disguising the passage in the cave where she spent the night, Clarke takes note of the presences that haunt her.
"Why are you still here?" she asks Maya, hiding a frown little and badly. The truth is, she still doesn't understand. She could be with Jasper. After all - "I am not the regret that holds you back," she says and knows she is right when, for the first time since she appeared in front of her, Maya meets her gaze with a firm one, the words that she addresses few, but clear and resolute, "No, but I am yours."
Nothing could be truer, she thinks and nods to herself. This must be an extraordinary morning in many ways because instead of falling silent and going to check the traps as she usually would, she is once again coming to a halt.
"Do you hate me?" It's a stupid question. Even if Maya doesn't hate her for what she did to her, she will never forgive her for exterminating her people. And yet she needs to hear her answer. God, when did she become so self-defeating?
Her hesitation is infinitesimal. "Right or wrong, that's what you chose," Maya replies and shakes her head. "None of us are innocent. I won't throw the first stone, Clarke. I wasn't that kind of person when I was alive. I don't want to become that now that I'm dead."
Clarke goes to check that traps.
***
The first time she hears the name the Grounders have given her, she burst out laughing and doesn't stop until she tastes the tears on her lips and her laughs turn into sobs.
***
"You have to go home. Your place isn't here."
Sitting by the side of the stream, Clarke continues to do the laundry, but she looks up. She realizes instantly that she has made a mistake. The look of exasperated frustration, the refractions of light from the canopy above their heads that seem to bring out tiny specks like freckles on Aurora's tired face, the martial posture in the shoulders. Everything cries out a name that she has forbidden herself to think, let alone name.
She swallows and closes her hands into fists to hide the slight tremor that passes through them, lowering the head.
"It isn’t even with them," she replies curtly.
"Just because you decided you don’t deserve it," Aurora says along the lines of her tone. Then she softens considerably. "It's peacetime for you too."
Wanheda whisper the elderly, her name has already turned into a bogeyman for children. In a different life she would have been fisa, a healer. Not in this, apparently.
"There will never be peace for me." Once pronounced, it has a bitter taste like all the truths that you would prefer to forget. "Don’t you understand?" Her hands are tight around the shirt she was rinsing, so tense that the joints begin to hurt. "The war is not over. It will never end."
She hears her walk away and counts the steps. It is usually at the tenth that she disappears. Five. Six. Seven. On the eighth Aurora pauses. A gust of wind carries her answer, and this too hurts, an intense burning like a wasp sting. "It's not over, it's true. You still carry it in your heart."
***
She doesn’t stop fighting. She fights tooth and claw, how she learned to do by training in villages when she stopped to trade her prey in exchange for news, medicinal herbs and spices, clothes.
Aurora reappears at her side during a rest. "Five hidden knives in addition to the one he threatened you with," she lists, in a well-established procedure. "His boots have a reinforced toe." She disappears again.
Hours later, after the third failed escape attempt, Aurora returns. Something on her tense face makes her heart beat at a faster pace. A name, the one she refuses to pronounce, fills every space within her. Bellamy, sings her blood. Bellamy, creak her sore bones. Bellamy. Bellamy. Bellamy.
"He's looking for you. Hold on as long as you can. Buy them some time. He's close."
***
The ceremonial dress that they made her wear adheres to the skin like a sheath. They braided her hair in an elaborate hairstyle, made up her eyes with war paint. She observes the reflection in the golden plate and sees a feral looking stranger. She has her face, but her gaze is cold as ice, like a blade treacherously planted between the shoulder blades.
She wonders if that's how they imagined her when they chose to give her that name. Wanheda. A farce. Just a title with no power. She runs her hands over the dress, smoothing imaginary folds.
Aurora looks at her like a hawk, without blinking. "Don’t be nervous."
"I'm not," she replies.
"Are you sure about this?"
The question recalls a similar situation, although the circumstances were completely different. Triggers painful memories. She purses her lips. "Do I have a choice?"
Aurora lingers. Her eyes meet hers in the distorted reflection. "One day you will have it," she promises with a fierce frown and rests a hand on her shoulder, squeezing slightly, "and that day will be glorious."
At the start, the end, and in the middle.
Strange how it mattered so much,
when now it matters so little.
- Lang Leav
The last time she saw him, she wore the vestiges of the title the Grounders gave her like a mask, like the double-edged sword in which she chose to transform herself. He asked her to go home. She refused. She wasn’t ready. She thought she had to prove that she deserved it. Part of her still thinks so.
The next time she sees him there is a girl's ghost behind him. She has an intelligent and attractive heart-shaped face, elegant and thin eyebrows like swallow wings. Clarke tries to remember her name, but the truth is, she has no idea who she is.
When she remains alone in the room, handcuffed and with her heart turn off, she cannot understand.
"I couldn't convince him," she murmurs to anyone, fighting against the lump in her throat and the sense of abandonment. Why?
Then she remembers the girl and has the answer she was looking for. Guilt. Sorrow hidden behind anger. Revenge sold as justice. Here's how Pike managed to win Bellamy's loyalty, his trust.
People surrounded by ghosts are loved ones. She always thought that. What does this belief reveal of her character, what does it let out of her heart? And what does it reveal about Bellamy that two women chose to stay with him even after death?
***
"Why isn't she here?"
She doesn't remember ever having experienced such pain. Or maybe yes. All pains are the same to the core, yet different. Like loves. Grieves are forgotten, you learn to anesthetize them, tame them to your will and then, when you seem to have returned to normal, you lose someone else and everything starts all over again, in an infinite cycle of perpetual pain.
Aurora indicates the tin case containing the Flame. "Because she's in there."
"What if I destroy it?" She feels herself gasping. "Would she become like you?"
For the first time since she knows her, there is a feeling of turmoil in Aurora Blake's eyes. "Would you really want it?"
That, more than anything else, breaks her. "I don't know," she says. Under the ribcage the pain is sharp and persistent, as if a rib had broken and pierced a lung. "I don't know what I want anymore. I just know I'm tired of being alone."
Aurora nods, her lips tight, her face lit by the glare of the candles in a play of jagged chiaroscuro. "Go home, Clarke," she says finally, and that simple statement seems to suck up the oxygen in the room and any residual energy from her body. Sheer obstinacy and adrenaline keep her on her feet now.
It is a prayer and much, much more.
"Do I still have one?"
"You will always have one," she replies. "Yours are the people you desperately protect."
***
Lincoln's ghost is one of the brightest she's ever seen. Clarke feels tears sting her eyes, unwanted. This, more than Wells or her father’s farewell, is the point of no return. Then Aurora leaves her side and extends her hand towards Lincoln who is watching her in awe and wonder. He must have already guessed who the woman in front of him is. The resemblance is remarkable after all.
"Nice to finally meet you, boy," Aurora says and if the edgy fold of her smile is purely Octavia, the way she weighs him, cold and calculating, is entirely Bellamy, his fierce protection. "I suppose I'm the nosy mother-in-law. I suggest you’d better get to work. Clarke has been trying to win my favor for months."
***
A muddy field and three hundred Grounders with wounds caused by firearms.
Burning them requires the joint work of thirty men.
At the end of the day she is so exhausted that every muscle in her body claims the comfort of a bed. Instead of heading for the tent that she and Lexa share, she falls with a thud where she is. Ghosts are a string of pearls against the horizon. Too many to count. Too many to pretend they don't exist.
Aurora appears at her side, gray as a cloudy sky, her eyes looking like molten lead, winter in her spine.
When Lincoln appears too, when she sees him making his way to the crowded ghosts, Clarke understands. Her heart emits discordant notes, like war drums. She runs towards him. It started to rain again, and her tears mix with the downpour, cleaning her cheeks streaked with earth, blood and sweat.
Lincoln's smile is the same as her father's, the same as Wells'. Ineffable. Enigmatic.
He can't do it. He cannot. "What about Octavia?"
Lincoln stops and her hands itch for the desire she has to portray him as he appears at that moment. A man stuck in a storm, in the only quiet spot while the rest of the world collapses and crumbles. Raindrops trapped on his eyelashes, on his nose, on his forehead.
"My people, my responsibility," he replies in a hieratic tone, staring at her and Aurora with unfathomable eyes like abysses.
The world shines again in front of her, burning and blazing and, not for the first time, when the dream fades, the weight of her duty lands on her. This time she doesn't collapse. Her shoulders have had time to get used to that burden, they are wide enough to bear it now.
"My people, my responsibility," she repeats. It has the sacred taste of an oath, but also of a sentence.
