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When Clarke is a child, she thinks she knows what love is.
Love is how she feels about Wells. Love is the way her parents think about her when she’s away in class. Love is how she sees her parents looking at each other when they aren’t watching her. The way her mother presses her mouth against her father’s shoulder when they embrace after a long day.
Love is simple.
It’s a story that keeps getting told, one that keeps her warm when the Ark grows chill and quiet at night, when she looks out into space and sees nothing but black.
Love is what keeps things warm.
When Clarke is a child, she thinks she understands.
(She doesn’t.
She’s a child.)
Clarke’s first kiss is with Wells. They’re five.
This is the story:
She’s drawing something simple. Pastoral. A bunch of trees, and herself standing on the ground with her parents, smiling.
Wells takes the green crayon.
She asks the price.
He tells her.
It’s a fair trade. Two seconds. Wells nods once after, like he’s just figured out some greater secret that he had been puzzling over for ages, and all she can think is is that all?
(Her first real kiss is nothing to write home about.
His name was Gibson, and he had been her date to one of the balls. The son of a friend of her mom’s.
His lips were dry and his tongue thick and heavy in her mouth.
He smudged her lipstick, and his fingers had tried to ruck up the skirt of her dress to her hips.
She’d shoved him back, and left.)
Chancellor Jaha and her mom talk about her and Wells when they think they can’t hear. Low tones and smiling whispers about their future, about how they’re headed for something they don’t yet understand.
She can’t help but bristle at it.
There’s so much her mother doesn’t - and won’t - ever understand about her, and for them to talk about her and Wells like they can’t make up their own minds, like they don’t know what’s best for themselves?
It doesn’t change anything.
She knows herself. She knows Wells.
There’s too much that would stand in the way. Their history, their friendship, their shared secrets --
it’s too simple to be love. Too uncomplicated. She knows how this is supposed to unfold - the way that it changes how you think and how you see the world (and yes, it’s brain chemistry, but also something beyond it, like knowing something, and later absorbing it as truth inside of yourself.
Like the first time you swim out in open water, and discover how much the word depth holds).
She knows that love is supposed to be like how she feels when she looks out the sliver of window into space, when she sees old pictures of Earth and dreams about it: the way the air smells, flowers, the look of trees, the soft firmness of the soil beneath her feet.
It’s supposed to be something you can’t stop thinking about.
It’s supposed to be wanting.
A boy tells her he wants her.
A boy tells her he loves her.
She tastes blood in her mouth.
This is the story:
A boy comes into a war he didn’t know he was fighting until it was too late. A boy comes into a war looking for a girl he loves, and fights for her memory, because it is a war, and fights for the idea of her, because she is missing and it is a war, and fights for his anger that he never got the chance to show how he loved her because they took her and she was gone and it was a war.
A boy comes into a war with a gun in his hands, and his heart in his mouth.
A boy. A war. A knife in her hands.
He says i love you and she cuts her mouth on it, and cuts his flesh with her blade.
This is a betrayal. Not just to him, but to the people who love him.
She loves him.
It is a betrayal to herself, and to the girl he left crying at the fences, and to her people, and to peace.
A boy comes to a war. A woman tells her the price of peace.
She stains her hands with his blood and bruises her mouth against his own.
Blood must have blood.
It would have been easier if she didn’t love him.
The blood’s beginning to dry and crack against the beds of her hands, and her head is full of noise. Like bees buzzing in a hive, static and claustrophobic and incessant.
Raven doesn’t look at her. Bellamy looks nowhere else.
Her hands fidget at her sides.
That night, her mother stays with her through the night. Brushes her hair back from her forehead as she sobs, as she cries so intensely that it makes her gag.
Her mother says it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, and she keeps crying.
Her heart is spilling all over the floor, and she thinks it wasn’t enough, none of it was enough because this was supposed to be a move for peace, and now, one of their own has paid the price.
She thought she knew what it had meant to lead in a place like this. She’d put herself in danger, put others in danger. She’d considered the risks and contemplated the exit strategies and the plans. She’s even broken out of prison. But there is something about loss that makes her feel like a child again, like she hasn’t known anything she’s been speaking about.
She used to be curious about the darkness in Bellamy’s eyes sometimes, about the way he looked when he wasn’t sure anyone was watching, guarded and deep.
She doesn’t wonder now.
She can taste its bitter tang on the back of her tongue for herself, and she can’t understand living a life like this. She can’t understand getting past the weight.
it’s not your fault, her mother says, and she knows that already.
The problem is, whether her fault or not, the boy who loved her is still dead, and she was the one who made the choice. The problem is no one gets to choose to take someone else’s life away without a cost. The problem is there is someone she is before this act, and there is her now, after, just like there was someone she was before the Ground, and someone she was after.
They are all coalescing, these multiple visions of her like reflections in a fractured mirror, and she isn’t sure which one is the truth anymore, or if there is no more truth to herself. Only variations of distortion.
The truth is it scares her that she could do this so easily, and her heart breaks because it must break, because the opposite of inflicting a death is honoring a life, and she will do it because she is this person; she will because she must; she will because a man is dead, and this is how they pay homage.
They talk on and on and on about how civilized they are, and she has to show it now.
It is her duty.
It is her burden.
Raven doesn’t talk to her.
It’s expected.
(The camp is small, and she keeps running into them. Always at a distance. Raven’s eyes are hard now, black and unreadable and malicious, and she just swallows and accepts it because she’s done this, and she’s done this to Raven, and all of those, for now, are unfixable things.
Raven and Bellamy sit together, their heads ducked down in quiet conversation. He touches her arm. He touches her hand, and Clarke feels a touch of jealousy strike her.
The divides from the Ark run deep.
She remembers what it was like when they first got here, when they were first trying to figure out the kinds of people they were going to be down on the Ground. She sees it now, too -- the suspicion, the cynicism, the weight that bears down on the two people she would have counted among friends.
Bellamy trusts her. At least, she thinks so.
And Raven used to.
But there are times when she can see it. Their faces guarded, their postures carefully constructed to be tall, to appear strong and defended, as if someone was coming to take something away from them. And the way they look at her when she’s there, as if there’s something she’s missing in translation.
and are they wrong?
when the only thing she has lost was taken from her by her mother, is this any worse than anything they have suffered?
Bellamy looks at Raven, and Raven whispers something, her eyes narrowed in Clarke’s direction, and Octavia brushes a hand along Raven’s shoulder, and Clarke understands.
This is not a place for her.
This has never been a place for her.
Girls like her are from Alpha Station, raised on the cleanest air, with heat, with decent rations and decent schooling and a belief that the system will right, if manned and guarded well enough.
But kids from the further stations -- Mecha, sure, and Factory, too -- have something else written into their stories, into their histories and their bodies. And now they’re here on the Ground, and nothing has changed.
She is still someone who grew up on Alpha.
They are still people who have grown up elsewhere.
They have never talked about what this means, except now Raven won’t forgive her. Her face is hard, and she looks at Clarke the way people from Factory used to look at her mom, the way the kids used to look at Wells when they first got on the ground.
As if they have no idea what they’ve done.
As if they have no idea about the people they’ve done things to.
As if they were monsters.)
Bellamy says you have to give her time.
She holds a cup of warm coffee -- or what passes for coffee -- against her mouth, and says, do you think she’ll ever forgive me?
He softens.
She thinks about taking his hand into her own, feeling its steady weight for herself.
His head tilts down towards the table, and she takes another contemplative sip.
you understand how close she and finn are. were.
She hums, nodding. Yes, she understands. She understood that when she found out Raven was his girlfriend. She understood a lot of things.
yeah, she says.
so i don’t need to tell you how much this means for her. and in a place like that...
what?
His eyes are guarded again when he meets her gaze. There it is again, the thing that can’t be explained to her, that can’t be communicated without being vague.
when you grow up like that, he says, and she closes her eyes and sees the automatic doors that separated the stations, hears the hiss of the hydraulics as they shut, people like that can become your family. it’s...complicated.
it isn’t, she says. don’t worry. i get it. she hates me. why shouldn’t she? i killed him.
hey, he says, taking her hand. you did what you had to do. it was better than letting him fall into the grounder’s hands, that’s for sure.
she wanted me to fight.
Bellamy’s shoulders sag. sometimes, he says, dropping her hand, sometimes, the smarter thing is not to.
She loved Finn, loves Finn, or, at least, that’s how this goes. You have to love someone who sacrifices themselves for you, who went hunting in a war because of you.
There has to be a way to justify the cost.
Not that she’s ever thought about it -- the ground has been too littered with dangers from the beginning to be careless about anything, and she hasn’t ever seriously allowed herself to consider what it was to think of being in love.
She’s seen the way Octavia and Lincoln look at each other (fight for each other, die for each other) and it isn’t that. Nothing she’s ever felt for anyone has come close to that. Maybe Wells, but Wells has gone and Wells has died (been killed) and she keeps losing these people she’s close to because of mistakes she’s made, and when does it stop? How does it stop?
A boy dies, trying to protect her, and another boy dies, trying to avenge her, and she never asked for any of this.
She remembers Bellamy’s face by firelight, the flickering light casting the angular shadows of his face sharper, his voice low and warm as they spoke. There are costs to leadership; they’d talked about that once.
Bellamy’s face was sharp, and reserved, and open, and guarded, somehow, as if he knew all the answers, but just wasn’t ready to give them to her. No wonder they trust him. No wonder they’d die for him. He’d do the same.
(and she?
who once locked her people out of a drop ship to let their bodies burn?)
They follow Bellamy because they trust him, and they believe in him, and they’d fight for him, if he’d let them (and he wouldn’t let them), but they follow her because she knows better, because she’s born better, because they believe in her knowledge, and her by extension, and not the other way around.
It must be different to be a king, she thinks. To have people’s faith in you resting in the weight of the power.
She speaks with authority, and they follow her, but they don’t believe in her the way they believe in Bellamy.
Now they have no reason to.
She begins walking the perimeter of the camp with Bellamy in the early dawn hours. It reminds her of what they used to do.
He’s quiet during these walks most of the time, and she likes to soak in the noise of the morning when it’s just the forest humming. They walk in step, close enough to each other for their hands to occasionally brush.
They don’t usually talk.
It’s enough for her just to feel his presence. Life in the camp has been so different from what it was like when they were on their own -- here, she’s made to feel their separateness, her mother hovering around her reminding her of the things that she’s supposed to be doing, the things she’s supposed to be, the life she’s meant to lead. Clean scalpels, neatly combed hair, the sanctity of the war room -- of power.
“How’s Lincoln doing?” she says.
Bellamy’s mouth flattens as he composes his answer. “It’s coming together,” he says. “Little by little. Octavia’s helping him through it.”
She makes a soft noise. “I can’t imagine it’s easy for her to sit through.”
He shrugs.
“She must really love him.”
Her eyes flick up to meet his, and a sudden burst of nervousness runs through her. He doesn’t give away anything, still lost in thinking of Lincoln and Octavia.
She reaches for his hand before she can think to stop herself.
“Hey,” she says.
He meets her gaze with his own, still and somber.
“They’re going to get through it.”
“I think...” he says, “sometimes she thinks she’s invulnerable. She’s strong, but she has to know she has limits.”
His fingers are curled loosely around her hand, and she can feel the calluses of his palm, his fingers. There’s dirt smudged along the wrist that she brushes with the pad of her thumb. She wonders why he never washes his hands.
“She doesn’t listen to me,” he says.
She manages a small laugh. “Maybe she thinks you’re just being overprotective.”
Her thumb finds a jagged scar just underneath the knuckle.
“Maybe,” he says. “She was never good at listening to me.”
“She’s been listening to you her whole life.”
He doesn’t respond, and she can’t think of anything else to say. It falls quiet.
A girl holds a boy’s hand at dawn in the quiet of the woods.
A girl. A boy. A war.
“Let’s keep walking,” she says, and he grunts as he follows her.
She drops his hand.
She dreams of Finn that night, half-desiccated, maggots crawling around a clean eye socket, hair still matted with blood against the opposite temple.
“Hey, Princess,” he says, his fingers brushing against her ankle, and she shivers. “Miss me?”
This isn’t real. She knows that.
“You shouldn’t be gone,” she says.
He sits on the edge of her bed. His hand is cold.
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“No,” she says. “I didn’t.”
“You loved me,” he says. “That’s what you told me before you did it.”
“I did,” she says. “I do.”
“Did you ever?”
His sunken face has the pall of death and judgment writ all over it, and she can’t look at him -- she can’t -- when he’s like this. Death is knowledge, and he can see through everything she says because she’s alive and he is no longer, she’s bound by laws (natural and otherwise) and he’s untethered. Walking the stars, just like he always wanted to.
“I did,” she says. “And Raven...”
“Raven loves me,” he says. “But you don’t.”
“Finn,” she says.
“I just died,” he says. “You just killed me, and you’ve already forgotten. Guess it’s that easy.”
“Finn,” she says. “Don’t -- ”
“Don’t what?” he says.
“Don’t go,” she says.
Don’t tell the truth, she thinks.
His face hovers near hers, his mouth pale. He blinks at her, nodding. He knows.
“All right,” he says. “All right.”
The story is
a boy dies for love.
a girl kills for love.
a pair of lovers suffers because it’s war, because there’s a cost for blood, because of bad decisions because of love.
The truth is
a boy dies.
a girl kills.
a pair of lovers can’t be a pair of lovers if they don’t know they’re in love, can they? the dead boy smiles because he knows the truth, and because the truth is a knife twisting inside of her ribs. the dead can punish like no one else can.
a dead boy comes to claim his own price. his own blood.
a girl lives.
It happens at the end of the week.
Raven, drunk, stumbles into her tent with a deep scowl on her face, her eyes black.
“Raven,” she says, standing.
“Clarke.”
She takes a step forward.
(It’s a mistake.)
“What did you -- ”
Raven moves towards her, connects a punch before she even knows what’s happening.
There’s another, and another, and then, it stops.
“Get off me!” Raven shouts, and Clarke feels the pulse of her blood against her temples, tastes blood in her mouth.
“Are you all right?” Bellamy says.
Clarke blinks through a swelling eye.
“Maybe we should take you to see your mom.”
“No,” she says, moving to stand. “I’ll be fine.”
Her fingers touch against her temple, and wet with blood.
“I’ve been through worse.”
He chuckles, and she suppresses a shiver.
“We should clean you up, at least. Hold on.”
He returns with a wet rag and some paste of crushed herbs that smells too much like tree bark for her to note anything else. He sits beside her on the edge of her bed, alternately dabbing away the blood and smearing on the paste.
His hands hover near her face, and she can note the freckles that dot his hands. She’d never noticed them before. Somehow.
The wet rag touches one of the deeper cuts along her eyebrow, and she winces. “Stop,” she says.
“I’m almost done,” he says.
“No,” she says, settling her hand on top of his wrist to draw his hand down. “Stop. I don’t -- this isn’t right.”
“Clarke.”
“He wasn’t supposed to die,” she whispers, hearing her own voice crack. The tears are hot against her cheeks, and she hates this, hates mourning, hates how ghosts follow her now with their own plans.
She looks up at him.
(A girl forgave.
A girl asks for forgiveness.)
“I wasn’t supposed to let him die,” she says. Her hands shake and he takes them between his own, forcing them still. “That was what I was supposed to do!”
“It was him, or the rest of us,” he says. “You made a hard choice.”
“It wasn’t mine to make.”
“It’s already done,” he says. “You can’t change anything now.”
“I can’t live with it,” she says. “Like this.”
He doesn’t say anything. His hands are warm around her own.
The war doesn’t stop.
The war goes on.
They plan a mission to liberate the 47.
They learned of war on the Ark. Learned the lessons that were thought to be important: its causes, the parties involved, the years of war, the ideological rifts that lead to divisions.
War is a product of violent temper and petty conflict.
War is a weaponization of those things.
War is one party against another, fighting over resources.
War is what led them to the Ark in the first place.
They learned of war.
They also learned of peace. Learned to place it above all else.
(And he was the only person who was there with her when they were on their own.
The only other fighting for peace, same as she.
She remembers the way the others looked at her. Another divide.
But Finn had understood her, and she him.
And isn’t that what love is, at least in part?)
“I want to know what your mom is planning,” Bellamy says, joining her as she eats a late dinner.
The torches burn low.
“If they’re going to make a move, I’m not going to let them shut us out of this.”
“They won’t,” she says. “But she knows that I won’t let them do that. She hasn’t exactly been keeping me in the loop. It’s just her and Kane and...”
“We have to find out, if we’re going to do it at all.”
Her jaw clenches. She nods.
She dreams of the drop ship that night. Of (what they thought was) the final battle.
Bellamy throws himself back into the fight.
Finn shoves him aside, pushing his way into the drop ship.
don’t leave without me, he says. don’t close the door on me, clarke!
She swallows hard.
we can’t wait, she says. we can’t.
don’t do this to me!
He runs for the door.
Her hand presses the button.
They’re in the woods outside the camp, where there aren’t any cameras. Where there aren’t any people watching them.
“Have you found out anything?”
“They’re taking four teams. I’m not sure how they’re going to meet up with the Grounders yet, but I heard them talking about meeting up with them.”
“How...”
“Lincoln,” she says.
“Octavia too, probably,” he adds.
She hums.
“Do you know when they’re planning to move out?”
“No,” she says. “I don’t know if they even know. My mom hasn’t been talking about it. I think Kane’s working on it.”
“I’m not going to let them move without us.”
“I know,” she says. “Just give me a couple of days.”
They pass around a large copse of trees, the ground smelling of dampness and moss. She forgets in the camp how much she misses it - being around the green and the woods.
They move down one of the smaller slopes, following the underbrush that will loop them back towards camp.
“I miss this,” she says.
i miss you.
His smile is brief, but full of light. She’s forgotten how much his face can change with it, how accustomed he’s become to living with darkness. “We didn’t really think about what it would mean,” he says. “Having them down here.”
She chuckles. “We didn’t think about a lot of things.”
“Are you...” he begins, tentatively. “Do you still think about what you had to do?”
She tries to keep her voice steady. “I try not to,” she says.
“Clarke...”
“Anything you have to say,” she says, “I’ve probably already heard.”
“You don’t need to hear anyone else say it,” he says. “Just yourself.”
She shrugs. A breeze ripples through.
“We should head back.”
He extends his hand past her. “Lead the way.”
Her mother gives her the schedule.
you’re my daughter, clarke. you don’t think i know you well enough to know when you’re planning something?
She doesn’t answer.
but if you’re going, you’re going to do it by my rules and my command, do you understand?
She agrees.
(She will so long as she agrees with her mother’s course of action.
She knows this place better than they do, no matter what they think, and she isn’t going to let anything stop her from rescuing her friends.)
She knows the way people talk about the two of them, like they’re something already settled. Bellamy and Clarke. Clarke and Bellamy. A package deal.
I trust him, that’s all, she hears herself saying, over and over and over.
And she does trust him. With her life. With friendship. He knows the truth of her more than anyone else there, has seen her in her worst moments of leadership, of weakness, of vulnerability. And she’s seen that in him too. It doesn’t make them anything more than what they are.
(and her head?
and her heart?)
She’s been asked so many times if she has any sort of claim to Bellamy (as if anyone has any sort of claim to anyone else) that she’s developed a rote response to it.
She understands it, though. There’s little she doesn’t on the Ground.
They’re both in positions of leadership. Both in positions of strength. They’re the ones their friends -- their people -- looked up to before the others arrived.
Everyone needs a hero.
A parent.
So, no, she says, Bellamy and I are just friends. You can ask him yourself, if you want.
(Nothing can be said of dreams.
In dreams, she isn’t a leader. She isn’t anything more than a body.
He pins her to the bed with his hips, his dark hair mussed and unruly. She breathes his name, and his answering laugh is low and warm.
He pushes inside her, and she sighs, wrapping her leg around his to draw him closer.
i missed you, she says.
He stills and she stifles a groan.
i missed you too.
don’t move, she says.
His arms brace on either side of her as he begins to rock his hips against hers. She bares her neck, groaning as he runs his teeth along her collarbone.
please, she says. bellamy, please.
Dreams don’t mean anything.
Everyone knows that.)
They take an even earlier morning walk the day they’re scheduled to move. The sun hasn’t even risen. They walk beside each other, tracing the outlines of the fence, silent.
It’s peaceful.
The first real kind of peace she’s felt in a long time.
“You think that this is going to work?” he says. “Really?”
She shrugs, digging the toe of her shoe into the ground.
“That’s a confident answer.”
“There’s no such thing as confidence where the Mountain Men are concerned. You know that as well as anyone.”
He chuckled. “We’ve had worse odds.”
“We got lucky.”
“Let’s hope we get lucky again.”
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s keep moving.”
They make their breakfast towards the north end of the camp with lukewarm coffee and smuggled hard bread rolls. They sit and watch the sun begin to rise across the sky.
She’s spent so much time here on the ground, and it never ceases to take her breath away.
He tears a piece of a roll off and hands it to her.
“You think we’ll actually manage to survive this war?” she says.
He shrugs. “We’ve done all right so far.”
“So far,” she repeats.
In the stories, this is when the girl tells the boy that she loves him. Or the boy tells the girl that he loves her. Because love conquers everything, because love is the first and last thing you should want to share.
The truth is fear is just as strong as love, if not stronger.
The truth is they’re both afraid of more things they care to admit - of the war, of dying, of living, of being rejected.
The truth is the only thing standing between the two of them is the two of them.
“Do you blame me,” she begins, “for what happened to Finn?”
He swallows. “I know you did what you had to do.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the best one that I can give.”
She takes his hand, brushes her thumb over his knuckles. “Bellamy, I...”
He meets her gaze, swallowing hard. “Clarke?”
Sunlight drips through in thin shafts, bright lines of light cutting across his cheek. She draws her hand up to cup his cheek.
“What are you doing?” he says.
She steps towards him and leans in, her nose bumping against his chin as she presses her lips against his. Once.
His eyes are closed when she pulls away.
“Don’t do this,” he says, voice low with warning. “Just because...”
She leans in and kisses him again. He kisses her back this time, his mouth forceful and bruising against hers. His mouth slick and sweet over hers.
“Because what?” she whispers. “You think this is because of what happened?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Bellamy, I -- I trust you.”
He licks his lips. “Me too.”
“You think we’ll get out of this alive?”
He shrugs. “We’ll go out fighting either way.”
She smiles. “Yeah,” she says. “I guess that’s something.”
When they start making their way out of the camp, they’re in separate groups. She glances at him once. Sees him loading his ammunition.
The way the story goes, this is supposed to be a moment of clarity. Of understanding.
She understands. She has always understood.
Send a hundred kids to the ground to see what’s sleeping.
A beast awakes.
A war starts.
Send a hundred kids to the ground, all of them fighters in one way or another.
Send them one of your purest, your brightest, to make sure that they remember how things used to be.
Send a hundred kids.
See how many survive.
See how many remember.
Across the yard, Raven has her hood up, sharpening a blade against one of the sharpening stones.
“Do you really think we’re ready for this?” her mother says.
“We have to be.”
She meets Raven’s gaze, and sees nothing but a deep rage. Spies Octavia and Bellamy, their hands clasped, saying whatever last words they think they have. Ready to die on their own terms, if they need to.
She meets her mother’s eyes then, and sees a sharpness in them she isn’t used to. Her mother touches her hand to her head.
“You really grew up down here, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” she says. “We had to.”
“I love you, Clarke.”
“I love you too.”
They march through the woods towards the mountains.
She squeezes her mother’s hand.
A girl goes to war.
A girl learns of love.
A girl learns.
Blood must have blood.