Chapter Text
‘Do not be afraid, Clarke,’ Lexa says. ‘Death is not the end.’
Clarke scoffs, because that is the most wistful thing she has ever heard in her life. Later, pushing Lexa’s sleeve up by their campfire and analysing smooth skin, she gives the implication a little more thought.
‘Sprained elbow,’ Clarke decides. It’s not specifically easy to tell given the lack of an x-ray machine, but nothing seems broken and the swelling is a fair indication. ‘Mild jarring to your wrist and shoulder. Should be fine with time.’
Lexa says nothing, but stares as the blonde fashions a sling, attentive. Clarke wonders why she started surrounding herself with stoic types - they're so terrible for conversation.
‘If you’re reborn, who leads your people when you’re young?’ she asks after she has tied the Commander’s arm close to her chest. Lexa shifts back against her fallen log and frowns.
‘My second, if I have one,’ she says. ‘Whoever is strongest, typically. They pass the time until I return, trained and of a decent age.’
Clarke doesn’t say how alien that sounds because it’s probably still a more effective command structure than whatever flimsy version of democracy her people have been playing at recently.
‘Are you always of the Woods Clan?’ Clarke wonders.
‘Since the bombs,’ Lexa says with a shrug. ‘I found where I was needed, and my spirit stayed. It would not have known where else to go.’
She says it like it’s simple, and clear, and not even slightly absurd, and Clarke frowns and wonders why green eyes stare at her like it is something she is supposed to already know. When she says nothing more, Lexa sighs and turns her gaze to the fire.
‘You are tired,’ she says coldly. ‘Sleep, Clarke. We will go in the morning.’
--
Despite Lexa’s agreement to Clarke’s plans they meet to talk further tactics every morning. Bellamy does not call in and Lincoln does not return.
‘The little Sky man is probably dead in the tunnels,’ one of the Grounders grumbles out at a meeting four days in, and Clarke feels every part of her body tense as she turns to him. Whatever doubtlessly toxic words bubble up in her throat stall between her teeth as Lexa beats her to the punch.
‘You will guard your tongue, or guard your neck – the choice is yours,’ the Commander says, levelling a dangerous glare on the man. ‘Keep yourself and your men in order until I tell you otherwise. Now leave my sight – all of you.’
If she hadn’t been spending her days with them for so long now Clarke might not have seen the defiance in his eyes warring with his shame. He shuts his mouth and says nothing, cowed by his leader, turns and forwards out of the war room. His equals follow him.
‘I’m sure your friend is fine,’ Lexa mumbles when her generals have left and it is just the two of them alone. Clarke exhales and shakes the tension from her spine, walks to Lexa’s side and goes about rolling up the Commander’s sleeve to check her arm. She doesn’t ask for permission because she knows enough about Grounders to know that it won’t be granted – but she knows Lexa well enough to know the woman won’t object. She will take medical treatment when it is forced so long as it is not in front of the eyes of her people; she is too wary of seeming weak.
‘The swelling’s gone down. But you should have kept it in the sling,’ Clarke says dryly. ‘It’ll take weeks to heal.’
‘I heal quickly,’ Lexa dismisses. Her other hand comes up to Clarke’s chin, nudging it up to catch her eyes. ‘Do not worry about your friend. He comes back or he does not come back, he still lived well. What did I tell you about guarding your heart?’
‘Nothing that sits well with me,’ Clarke says and watches the way the Commander’s eyes narrow with her frown. ‘I’ve thought about it, and I think you’re overcautious.’
‘It is a caution born of experience.’
‘Born of Kostia, you mean.’
‘Clarke-’ the Commander cuts herself off, and Clarke watches her choke around the stone in her throat and wonders when the stoic leader disappeared. The girl in front of her is not the kind to crush large men beneath harsh words and throw knives into traitorous hands – this girl is sad, and cautious, and buried beneath her grief; desperate to be heartless and grasping at straws to stay that way.
‘You never talk about her,’ Clarke prompts gently. Lexa looks at her from beneath a furrowed brow, and Clarke sees youth and loss and caution in her eyes with the glow of the torch on the wall.
‘She never should have happened,’ Lexa grumbles. Her tone implies an end to the conversation right then, but Clarke jumps up to sit on the war table at her back and tilts her head to encourage the warrior on. The Commander scowls and crosses her arms over her chest – and gives in. ‘Kostia was not my – she was not meant for me. I pursued her in spite of that, and she died because of it.’
‘What do you mean by “meant” for you?’ the blonde asks. Lexa glowers.
‘Meant for-’ she breaks off, and Clarke watches slender fingers clench into fists. ‘-me. The Commander. The-’ she gestures to herself in frustration, struggling for the phrase. ‘-Clarke, I don’t know how to explain this. I knew she was wrong, as I knew I would be leader.’
‘Reincarnation,’ Clarke says, and watches the young woman’s eyes light up at the familiar idiom and the understanding grasp that comes with it.
‘Yes. That was your phrase,’ Lexa says, nodding quickly. ‘When I die, my spirit chooses another. And so does she.’
‘She?’
‘My partner. My other,’ Lexa tells her. The Grounder says it with such fire, such reverence, that Clarke has to wonder what those words mean to her, exactly. There is a dedication and a love there that goes deeper than Clarke has ever even considered. ‘Kostia was not her.’
‘But you loved her,’ Clarke offers gently. Any weakness – any love – goes out of the Commander’s tone. Her gaze hardens with such suddenness that anyone who didn’t know her on a day-to-day basis, with a sword in her hands and steel in her heart, may have been jarred by the transition. Clarke’s glimpse of the girl beneath is gone.
‘She was beautiful, and warm, and here,’ Lexa tells her, and it almost sounds like an accusation, ‘and I was weak. She was a mistake I shouldn’t have made.’
Lexa calls an end to the conversation by stomping to the steps. Clarke doesn’t know if the Commander hears when she calls:
‘Then why did you?’
--
Lexa avoids her outside of meetings, and Clarke spends her evenings watching Octavia train. There are aspects of Octavia’s apprenticeship that are a mystery to her – culture and tradition that belongs only between student and mentor, lessons that Clarke has no part in – but the afternoons and combat practice that comes with them are as welcoming to Clarke as any part of Grounder culture ever will be. Octavia learns to spar with fists, teeth, sticks, and swords. Most days it is against Indra, but sometimes it is another Grounder trusted by the General. More often than not the brunette ends her sessions bruised and bloody, favouring one limb over another and scowling, but she is not without her little victories – and the longer it goes on the more frequently Clarke sees her friend landing solid hits and dodging some of her own.
In those moments it is almost like the brunette can forget: her brother is gone, no word, and her lover has not returned from the tunnels that eclipsed him once before. Almost.
Sometimes – on the days that Indra orders a friend to trade blows with her apprentice – the warrior will beckon Clarke into the clearing and coach her through hand-to-hand. She is not a kind tutor – she leaves Clarke’s brow split, her lip bleeding and her ribs bruised, and does not pull her punches – and it is obvious that she enjoys laying the girl out. At the end of these sessions Clarke takes Octavia back to her tent and cleans both their wounds, and they each scowl at every graze and smile at every hint of progress.
A few days in Clarke throws a particularly vicious punch at Indra’s face mid-bout and is surprised to find that it connects. She apologises when she resets the warrior’s broken nose, and it is the first time she sees anything that even vaguely passes for a smile on the woman’s face.
‘It almost makes up for training two whelps instead of one,’ the warrior tells her lowly. ‘The Commander was right about you. I should have trusted that. She always is – in every life.’
Clarke smiles, and earns a black eye for it later on. She doesn’t prompt conversation because she knows better, but later - when it is just Octavia and Clarke and a tin of salve, tending to their wounds - Clarke questions.
‘Octavia,’ she begins, ‘have you learnt anything about their command structure at all?’
The girl stiffens and looks at her with cautious eyes.
‘For what purpose?’
‘Genuine curiosity,’ Clarke says with a troubled frown. ‘Would there be another reason?’
‘I-’ Octavia pauses thoughtfully, but shakes her head. ‘No. Don’t worry. I know some things. Not a whole lot. What would you like to know?’
Clarke bites her lip idly.
‘The Commander’s spirit is reincarnated, right?’ she says and presses on at Octavia’s nod. ‘But how do they know? If it could be anyone – how do they know it’s not just someone who knows their history and wants power? How do they vet someone for that?’
‘They don’t,’ Octavia says. She shrugs and pauses with a frown – probably thinking back on her lessons. ‘Despite where she’s born, or to whom, the Grounders believe the spirit shapes the being. I think she always looks pretty much the same.’
Clarke wonders if that mean Lexa’s love does too.
--
All of the Grounder Generals are getting testy, but – as Clarke has almost come to expect, honestly – one of them takes it too far. His name is Axel, and Clarke knows him by his scowl, the angry tone he always uses in their meetings, and the scar that runs all the way from his hairline to his lip. He is young, and gruff, and tall, and arrogant, and eager for war – and he apparently decides that his Commander is holding him back with flimsy excuses; he mistakes logic for weakness and tries to expose it as such. By the fire one night, twelve days after Lincoln and Bellamy disappeared into the trees, he and ten of his strongest men attempt to stage a coup.
Clarke is talking to Raven back by her tent about explosives and how to build them when she sees it. Lexa is standing between Clarke and the fire, her profile shadowed by the throw of the flames as she trades words with her guard. Grounders and Sky People alike mill by the conflagration – some standing, some seated. Axel uses the lax firelight to disguise his approach, but flames are as good at casting shadows as they are at casting light and they catch on the glint of a blade. Lexa – distracted and facing the other direction, closer to the fire – doesn’t notice. Clarke pushes half to her feet mid sentence and waits for something to go wrong.
‘-wait, Clarke?’ Raven asks, startled by the movement, and Clarke shakes her head at the mechanic and hushes her, hand straying to the knife at her belt. Axel closes in on the Commander, and Clarke can pinpoint the exact moment that Lexa’s guard sees what she does. The large man jerks into motion, grabbing his Commander by the shoulders and shoving her away, and it is the only reason Lexa suffers a gash to the side instead of a knife in the back.
The guard moves to attack but one of Axel’s men comes up behind him – knife in hand – and goes straight for the throat while Lexa stares, hand drifting far too slowly to the sword at her back. Behind her, Axel readies another slash; Clarke doesn’t wait for him to have the chance.
She takes off – faster that she has ever run in her life – and covers the metres between them in moments, throwing all her weight into his torso beneath his raised arm. He is larger than her, and she can feel it, and it might not have done a thing if he had been expecting the tackle. She catches him unawares, though, so her momentum takes them both across the last metre or so and straight into the fire. Axel lands flat on the burning embers and Clarke lands on him.
Somewhere around them there is a shout, a slither and clash of steel, a gun going off – but the body beneath her writhes and heavy hands shove at her shoulders and wrap around her neck, and Clarke doesn’t have time to pay any mind to anything other than this. She chokes and Axel screams.
Clarke scrambles for the knife at her belt and finds it caught awkwardly between their bodies, irretrievable. Fire licks up his arms, plays by her cheeks, and thick fingers tighten around her throat. She sticks her hand into the flames, grabs a handful of coals and shoves them into his face.
The noise she is rewarded with is hardly even human, but his rough fingers leave her collar to wipe instead at his own burning eyelids – and then Clarke feels strong hands clench in the back of her jacket and yank her off of him and out of the blaze. Lexa throws her to the ground and turns back to deal with her would-be killer, still screeching amidst the inferno.
Lexa’s guard is dead, along with three of Axel’s men. The rest of them are standing at sword point and gunpoint, outnumbered in the wake of the failed attempt on the Commander's life. Clarke’s arm burns and she glances at it to find her sleeve on fire. Before she can so much as move to put it out Raven stomps up beside her with a bucket of water and tips it over her head and down her arm, dousing the flames. Clarke splutters and blinks water from her eyes, then squints up at the wildly smiling mechanic.
‘You enjoyed that far too much,’ she notes, and Raven shrugs, tosses the bucket away, and helps the blonde to her feet.
‘Might need a haircut,’ the mechanic tells her. ‘And a new hand. You’ve given a whole new meaning to “smouldering” looks.’
Two grounders stride forward to finish pulling Axel from the embers, and Lexa glares around the fire sharply. Raven shuts her mouth and Clarke goes to cross her arms until she realises: her palm is black, burned to hell, and the adrenaline coursing through her veins is the only reason she isn’t crying out at the pain.
‘It seems some of you are allowing yourselves to doubt my judgement,’ the Commander addresses. ‘You think we are waiting needlessly. You think being smart is the same as being weak. You think we move too slow.’
The grounders yank Axel to his feet and he howls. One of them stuffs a rag in his mouth to quieten him while the other ties his hands. They turn him around and Clarke sees what she has done to him – the glowing coals embedded in his furs, melded into blistering skin. She swallows the urge to vomit.
‘Take these men to the mountain boundary and bind them to the trees,’ the Commander orders. ‘The fog can have them. Let them be a lesson to the rest of you about what happens to those who move too quickly.’
She turns to Clarke with eyes that scream murder and gestures the young woman to follow her as she moves to leave. Clarke hesitates for only a second – long enough for Raven to shrug at her and mutter a parting “good luck” – before doing just that. Lexa leads her to the healer’s hut – marked by the tub of clean water kept in the cold by the door – with fast steps and a sure stride, takes Clarke by the arm and drags her inside.
There is a stone table in the centre of the room and a stack of shelves with a low desk running the entirety of one wall, littered with jars and tools. The healer sits on the bunk in the opposite corner, bored without a patient, a dirty journal and charcoal in his hands; Lexa dismisses him promptly and glares until he scurries from the room.
Clarke lets herself be shoved back to sit on the stone slab and watches idly as the other young woman searches the shelves, shoving jars around amidst the structured mess until she finds the one she’s looking for. She tuts when she finds it, scrounges up a bandage, and strides over to drop them at Clarke’s side on the archaic operating table.
‘A needle and thread,’ Clarke prompts, smiling in spite of the sombre mood when the grounder scowls at her. Her hand throbs painfully, and she persist. ‘For your side, Lexa. You’re bleeding.’
‘Later,’ the Commander grumbles. Her eyes narrow and her tone promises retribution if she is disobeyed. ‘Stay.’
She disappears out the door for a moment before returning with a bowl of water, cooled by the night air. A rough hand wraps around Clarke’s wrist and turns it to expose her palm – blackened by the embers of the fire, cracked and bleeding. The Commander tears a strip of cloth from her sleeve and wets it. Despite the tight grip on her wrist the stroke of the cloth against Clarke’s hand is gentle – though hardly less painful for it. Lexa washes the ash away and exposes the red, blistering skin underneath.
‘Soak,’ she orders sharply, pushing the water bowl to Clarke’s side and glaring at her beneath a furrowed brow. When the Ark leader’s hand is submerged in the water, coaxing the heat from her palms, Lexa nudges her way between Clarke’s knees, pushes blonde hair back behind reddening ears and drags the cloth across the skin of Clarke’s cheek as well. Clark winces at the scratching feeling that comes with the motion and stares at the warrior, noting her frown and the few drops of blood staining her brow.
‘May I ask you a question?’ Clarke asks, hazarding to breach the silence. Lexa’s eyes flicker to hers for a moment before they focus back on the raw skin, lips pursing.
‘That depends,’ she says lowly. She is clearly fuming – though whether that is at her men’s betrayal or Clarke’s reckless handling of it is a mystery.
‘Did you ever love anyone else?’ Clarke queries, disregarding the qualifier. She ignores the way the cloth pauses against her skin. ‘Other than your partner? Or was it just Kostia.’
‘Clarke,’ comes the warning.
‘A yes or no will suffice,’ the Arker says smartly, lifting her burnt hand from the water bowl and using wet fingers to wipe the splatter of blood from the Commander’s face. Lexa glowers and throws the dirtied cloth to the side, catches Clarke’s hand and returns it to the water.
‘Yes,’ she mumbles. ‘Now leave your burn to cool.’
She avoids Clarke’s eyes – leans around her for the dusty jar and busies herself with the catch. Clarke just watches her, and waits. Lexa doesn’t speak again until her finger are coated in whichever salve she’s chosen for the occasion and she is sweeping them across Clarke’s cheek, her jaw, down to her neck.
‘Several times. I married thrice, that I can recall,’ the Commander grunts out, despite her initial reluctance. ‘In lifetimes when I was born too early or too late, or where we didn’t meet.’
‘What made Kostia different?’
‘Me,’ Lexa says. Her fingers pause on their way down Clarke’s neck and she considers the question further. ‘This world. It’s changed. I am not now who I once was. The lives I have led here are infinitely more dangerous – for me, and for anyone around me. I – loved her more deeply than I intended.’
She blinks and pulls Clarke’s hand from the water again, pressing her fingers to the Ark leader’s palm to test the temperature. The Commander apparently deems her skin cool enough as she dries it off and slathers it with salve.
‘Did your partner love others?’
‘With frequency,’ Lexa growls. She pokes at Clarke’s hand, and Clarke nudges her wounded side with a knee in return. They both wince. The Commander grumbles. ‘We were made for one another, but the circumstances always changed. We were not always what the other needed. I do not blame her for finding happiness with others when I was not available to provide it.’
Her jaw clenches, and Clarke watches quietly as calloused fingers reach for the bandage and set about wrapping Clarke’s blistering hand. They are silent, and Lexa’s actions are precise. Her gaze does not lift from Clarke’s raw fingers, even when they are covered by gauze.
‘Hey,’ Clarke says when the bandage is tied. She takes her free hand and bumps Lexa’s chin up with gentle fingers. Green eyes lock on hers, wild. ‘She wouldn’t blame you either.’
Lexa holds her gaze for a few long seconds, hands lowering to Clarke’s knees while she rocks forward slightly on her feet, and for a moment Clarke is almost convinced the Commander is going to lean in and – Lexa smiles, barely, and ducks her head, and pushes away to look for rubbing alcohol and thread.
‘Stop being reasonable and stitch me up.’
Clarke rolls her eyes, hops off the table and moves to comply.
--
The burns heal quickly, assisted by the Grounders’ salve. The rawness of Clarke’s face subsides in two days, but her hand takes longer. Lexa forces her to stay after every morning meeting for a week and a half so that the Commander can change the bandages herself; the redness wanes and Clarke is left with smooth pink skin that is sensitive to the touch and no longer needs to be bound.
Axel and his men die, as promised, in the acid fog – one of Lexa’s guards reports it back four days after the sentence – and it allays the other Grounder’s restlessness for perhaps a week. They rehash the plan, and Clarke proposes a bomb to be planted during the attack – a blast that will let them all get away back into the tunnels beneath and leave the Mountain Men to choke on radiation in their wake. Then they start fidgeting again – grabbing at weapons by the campfire and complaining for lack of motion – and Lexa seems half a mind to join them. Clarke soothes her with soft words and reason, and the cool mantra of “give it time – Bellamy will come through – just another day” while she removes the girl’s stitches and checks her sprained arm - healed now, of course. She says it, and hopes, but it has been weeks now with nothing from Bellamy and she is just as close to throwing caution to the wind as they are.
She doesn’t have to. Right when they reach the end of their rope Raven’s radio echoes at them with something other than static. Clarke’s heart sinks when it is Jasper’s voice they hear.
‘Tell Clarke she has the go-ahead,’ he says. ‘Bellamy’s down, but the job’s done. I’ve got you from here. Hurry.’
They scramble to respond, hundreds running into the trees – following plans that have been made and remade more times than they can count, burned into their brains by time and tension. Half move to lure the Reapers from the mines – hopefully to incapacitate them rather than kill. Lexa’s company goes for the tunnels with the aim of breaching the mountain and Clarke goes with them – with Abby and Kane and Octavia and thirty other Arkers at her heels. She wonders who will open the doors for them down below, what happened to Bellamy that kept him from disabling their defences for so long. Something has gone terribly wrong and she doesn’t know who they have left inside. Either way, their rushed trek through the woods is unhindered by poison fog or any other nasty surprises that Mount Weather may have hidden in its depths. Lexa halts them by the tunnel entrance and turns to take in her people.
‘Brace yourselves,’ she calls. ‘We will take the mountain, and get our people back with it, but the enemy will be vicious. Some of us will die. You will have an hour before the Ark bomb goes off; retreat before then. Will you follow me?’
‘Yes!’
Clarke doesn’t know who calls it first, or how it catches on, but the answer is resounding. Lexa commands loyalty from her people and Clarke has always known it, but it has never been clearer how much of it she has earned. The Commander looks over their group critically, eyes masked in warpaint, and Clarke knows that this moment and everything that it will lead to will haunt her dreams for the rest of her life. Dark eyes turn to Clarke and there is something hostile in them and something soft; Clarke cannot identify either.
‘And you?’ Lexa asks – quieter, just for her, jaw rigid.
‘Until it kills me,’ Clarke responds without hesitation. Lexa frowns while Kane fidgets beside them. Despite her stone expression, her voice gives away a hint of pain, of fear, of wistfulness when she says:
‘It always does.’
A war horn sounds, and Clarke is not given the time to contemplate the meaning.
--
It was supposed to be simple: break in, break the weak out, blow a hole in the side and kill everyone in their way. Somewhere in the midst of it all Clarke would put a bullet in President Wallace’s head for letting things get this far. As far as war plans go, theirs was pretty damned simple. Just a few things it didn’t account for:
Lincoln’s weakness, the three weeks it would take Bellamy to get loose and turn others to his cause, and – perhaps most importantly, given the circumstances that spiral from him – Dante’s creepy son.
Bellamy himself opens the doors for them, down beneath the mountain. He looks like shit. Clarke knows without asking that he has been caught, tortured, used – but somehow he has broken free, found Jasper, and passed along his cause. Three of the forty-seven stand beside him with liberated guns, and he makes to follow them back into the mountain until Clarke orders him to hold the exit. Octavia stays on him with a few guards, Marcus and Abby.
‘We'll send the injured here,’ Clarke says. ‘Treat urgent wounds and ferry them home.’
He looks like he wants to argue, but his knees quiver with the effort and she sees the moment he realises he is too weak to continue. She’s grateful; he has done enough already.
Clarke and Lexa lead the rest of their warriors into the mountain. The next half hour is a hunt – every floor, every room they can beat their way into with alarms ringing in their ears. They find the Grounders, strung up and funnelling blood, and release them and send them out. They find some of the forty-seven – running the halls, and hiding in rooms, and locked in cages in the lower levels looking gaunt and used – and Clarke knows for sure now that they will not all make it. They find Jasper, and liberate him from the control room he has locked himself in after Lexa’s guard beat the three Mountain Men standing outside the door to death.
Clarke even comes across Dante at one point when their group is down to just her and Lexa, three guards and two guns – all the rest gone (from this life or back to the exit with the wounded). She sees it in his eyes – the recognition, the fear, the apology. She doesn’t want to hear it. She remembers waking in a clean room, being given clean clothes and lied to just as cleanly. Clarke hardens her heart and shoots him in the head in the hallway before he can part his lips and beg forgiveness, splays his blood against the cement of the floor. He has sat in power and watched atrocities happen beneath the ground for too long – made a mess of things, like she makes a mess of him.
‘IED’s set,’ comes Wick’s voice over the radio at Clarke’s belt. ‘Twenty minutes. Get out of there, guys.’
Boots sound in the hallway and Lexa grabs her arm to yank her back, and they all run back down into the depths, through dark halls and dark rooms and thirty flights of stairs. They get to the exit, and stand guard while all of their people funnel through into the tunnels – the wounded and emaciated carrying one another out and the strong toting weapons. Bellamy goes, and Octavia, and Kane, and Abby – Wick stumbles down the stairs with three Grounders at his side and a manic smile on his face and he says 'they’re not defusing that thing,' before he bolts away into the dark, 'no way in hell'.
When it is clear that no more of their own are coming and the distant sound of shouts and rushing boots echoes from the stairwell, Lexa and Clarke call final retreat and escape into the tunnels themselves. Lexa has three guards left, all with war in their eyes and blood on their faces. Reapers catch them at an intersection, kill one guard and send them running the wrong way. Marching boots follow them through tunnels, and then Clarke is backed up to a long drop over a lake far below with a Grounder princess beside her, and she is furious and so unimpressed at the parallel.
‘Again,’ she says, ‘of course,’ and ignores Lexa’s dark glance. Four soldiers in tactical gear turn the corner to face them, and Lexa’s guards bear swords against men with guns and laser pointers. A man in a bloody business suit who breathes the air freely and doesn’t belong within it steps forwards, the look on his face caught between rage and joy – sadistic, monstrous.
‘You killed my father,’ he says, and Clarke knows without a doubt that this man – Dante’s sick son – has Sky blood running in his veins, stolen from someone unwilling. She lifts her gun to fire, takes out two soldiers and finds her magazine empty. Lexa’s guards shoot forward, and Cage’s soldiers just shoot.
Clarke yanks the knife from Lexa’s belt beside her, darts forward and buries it in a slim throat, stares into his eyes as he dies and whispers: ‘It's not your blood. Give it back.’
One of Lexa’s men falls, and the other one struggles, and Clarke feels strong arms wrap around her waist and yank her back to the edge - into daylight, rushing water and empty air. She tackled a man into fire, once, and now Lexa wrestles her into free-fall. Somewhere above them Mount Weather booms and a slope is eclipsed in flame.
The water is no more pleasant this time around.
--
Lexa pulls her from the lake. Unlike her mentor, she doesn’t crack Clarke over the head with a rock when they are sitting, soaked, on the shore. No more bodies fall from the dam and none emerge from the water, and Clarke knows that none will; those that are not already dead will have too much else to worry about to bother with chasing them down. They catch their breath in silence, and then Lexa starts laughing – shaking with it, letting it ring across the water – and it may be the most amazing sound that Clarke has ever heard.
‘We blew up a mountain-’ the Commander says.
‘Part of a mountain,’ Clarke corrects.
‘-and you can’t even swim.’
Clarke scoffs, and smiles – Lexa acts like it is the most absurd thing she has ever encountered – and forces herself to her feet. Far above them, Mount Weather smokes and ash spirals down with the breeze. They are a day’s walk away from home - if they choose to rush - and the nights are too cold now for wet clothes. Her jacket is soaked and she struggles out of it to lay it down on the stone shore, hoping it will dry in the sun. She follows it with her shirt, toes off her boots, and when she unbuttons her jeans she hears Lexa’s laughter choke off behind her. A glance reveals the woman is not at all in danger, so Clarke ignores it.
‘I lived in the sky all my life,’ she says idly, and steps towards the water in nothing but her underclothes and a smirk. It reminds her of Octavia, back in the beginning – free for the first time in her life down on the ground, unaware of the danger that was coming. ‘I guess you’ll have to teach me.’
--
They set up camp to sleep that night. Beside the fire, out in the woods, Clarke probes for nerves.
‘Do you remember all of your past lives?’
Lexa is silent, leaning back against a felled log and staring into the fire – and it is not unlike the night after they locked the gorilla in the ruins of the zoo and treated their wounds by the fire. Clarke watches her stone jaw clench and relax again before the Commander flicks brown hair back over her shoulder and meets her gaze. It feels a lot like a challenge.
‘Not wholly,’ she says. ‘Moments. Clothes that I wore, places that I went, people that I knew, things that I felt. Some things are clearer, others are shadows through the flame. There are things I see with crystal clarity – triggered by familiar moments or objects, things – and some nag at me for days and never fully surface. When I was younger I thought them to be dreams.’
‘How many lives have you had?’ Clarke asks.
‘I couldn’t say,’ Lexa replies. ‘I don’t know. But I remember things – from before.’
‘Before? Before the bombs?’
‘Yes,’ the Commander nods. ‘I remember buildings, and cars, and televisions. I remember being in a city filled with thousands upon thousands of people. And before that – war and dirt, spanning ages. I remember being young with a sword in my hand and another language on my lips that is foreign to me now.’
Clarke can imagine it. And when she does, she realises with sudden clarity that somewhere along the way Lexa’s conviction has convinced her: this is more than Grounder superstition and shared delusion, or inherited psychosis. Lexa is larger than this one life, and Clarke believes her.
‘I have been a warrior in all my lives, Clarke,’ Lexa tells her grimly, eyes blazing. ‘In different ways. Armed with swords and guns and words. I was a writer once, I think – or so fancied myself. A soldier. A criminal. A judge. A poet. I remember it in pieces.’
‘What about her?’ Clarke asks gently. Lexa’s teeth clench and her jaw tics, and she looks away. Clarke feels a stone on the floor beneath her digging into her side and tamps down on the urge to move for fear of inciting the already scowling Commander.
‘I remember her in every life,’ Lexa spits. Clarke’s head tilts at the venom within it. ‘She is an artist, and a speaker, and a bleeding heart. I love her in every life.’
‘But she doesn’t remember you.’
Lexa shakes her head, then nods. Clarke doesn’t understand.
‘She did,’ the Commander says. ‘Before the Armageddon. But we did not always meet, and we did not always meet well, and the memories would come and go. We were too early and too late, time and time again. We fought together, and fought each other, and intersected at bad ages in bad ages, and then-’
She sputters when she chokes, and Clarke jerks to sit up in alarm but Lexa is wiping her eyes and – she’s crying. And what a strange day it has been, to reign victorious over the mountain clan, rain ash across the earth, and to see the heartless Commander laugh and cry within hours of each other. Clarke pushes to her feet and approaches quickly and quietly – cautious – and sinks to her knees beside the Commander. Gentle hands reach out to pull Lexa’s away from her face; they encounter little resistance. Clarke hushes her and wipes the tears from smooth cheeks, and Lexa stares at her with more sadness than she can bear.
‘Gone. So few people in the world, so far apart. You have to understand – I was alone, Clarke, for so long,’ Lexa says. Clarke has never heard her plead before, but this is what it sounds like. ‘I was so alone. I was desperate. Kostia was never meant to happen. You have to understand.’
Clarke pulls the young woman to her and lets Lexa muffle silent sobs against her jacket because she doesn’t know any better way to calm her – doesn’t understand the pleading, doesn’t know where it is coming from.
(She whispers reassurances into dark hair because, somewhere inside, she does.)
--
Clarke doesn’t sleep that night. Lexa doesn’t leave her arms, and Clarke doesn’t wake her – it is the first time she has seen the Commander sleep and she has no intention of interrupting that. She lets the fire burn out and leaves them to warm by the shared heat of their bodies, more worried about seeing in the dark than freezing. The Mountain Men may be dead and crippled, but there are other dangers in the woods and Clarke stays up to see them coming. Nothing does.
Shortly before dawn, Lexa stirs in her arms but does not escape from them.
‘We have a long walk ahead of us,’ the Grounder mumbles, voice rough with sleep. ‘Rest a while. I will keep watch now.’
They trade places, and Lexa lulls her to sleep with fingers dancing in blonde hair. It is the best that Clarke has slept since medical inducement in Mount Weather, but – characteristic of the world they live in now – she wakes suddenly some hours later with a hand over her mouth and a knife being pushed none too gently into her hand. The skin of her palm itches and curls around it. Lexa crouches above her and scans the trees, and only moves when she knows Clarke has awoken.
Somewhere in the woods branches snap beneath heavy boots, and Clarke resigns herself to the fact that she will never have a pleasant walk in this place for as long as she lives.
--
They make it back to Lexa’s village coated in Reaper blood, dragging Lincoln’s reluctant body bound in his own ropes behind them. Scouts cheer along the path to herald their return – the two victorious leaders, back home a day late and bearing a gift. Indra and Octavia move to greet them – the former halting a metre away to converse in low tones with the Commander and the latter having a good go at trying to crash tackle Clarke right off of her feet.
‘Thought you were dead, Princess,’ the apprentice warrior says, lifting Clarke off of the ground with the strength of her bear hug.
‘You’re not that lucky,’ Clarke replies with a huff and a smile. She pushes the other girl away and gestures to the dazed man behind them, even as Abby and Raven and a particularly hallow looking Bellamy Blake head towards them from the camp. Beside her Lexa smiles – barely, but Clarke knows what to look for. ‘Look what we found in the woods. He’s a little drugged up, but we’ll get it back out of him quickly enough.’
If Octavia has something resembling tears in her eyes, no one mentions it to her – not even Indra.
--
The next weeks are a mess of celebration. Sky people and Grounders share food and drink, joke and dance. They hunt together, eat together, live together, and lay their dead to rest (and there are many, many more than there should have been, and Clarke remembers every name). The bad blood between them is not gone, but it is held at bay by camaraderie and victory and the memory of a common enemy that no longer poses a threat. Abby takes a team to rehabilitate the Reapers, and one by one those men and women slide back into the populace with bowed heads and wary smiles, ashamed and welcomed in spite of it.
Clarke and Lexa talk briefly about the future – protection and integration, and an alliance that will last – and then they leave the war room and join the festivities and mutter plans over drinks instead.
They join the hunting parties and go with their people into the woods, and every night without incident is another brick knocked from their guard. Two weeks from the win, Bellamy comes to them on legs that shake less now, smiles and asks for a spear. Octavia follows him with cautious eyes and a happy quirk to her lips, glad for his livelihood and worried for his health. Miller volunteers, and Lincoln slides into their group before they leave – sets aside his solemn attitude for the occasion – and Lexa rounds up two of her guards, and Indra who insists on accompanying them. They hunt. Lexa’s best tracker stays at the front with Bellamy and Octavia beside him, always learning; the other guard chats idly with Miller, asking about Ark life and his days within the mountain, and offers some culture facts in return. Lincoln and Indra walk side by side and say little. Lexa walks steadily by Clarke at the back of the pack watching over their friends, a spear in one hand while the other knocks idly against the blonde's.
Clarke glances down and for a moment considers the touch accidental – but Lexa is resolute in not looking at her, lock-jawed, and there is nothing unplanned about it. She smiles and catches worn fingers in her own - and for all her stoicism, Lexa cannot hide the tiny jerk of her shoulders at the contact. The Commander doesn’t even so much as glance at Clarke but her rapidly reddening ears give her well away. Clarke feels calloused fingers twist hesitantly with her own and slows her steps to lag back a little further from the group.
‘Is this your best seduction?’ Clarke questions with a smirk. The red spreads to Lexa’s cheeks. ‘Brushing hands in hunting parties? How romantic.’
‘No,’ Lexa tells her, tone stiff. ‘I am usually much more forward.’
‘You’ll have to show me sometime,’ Clarke teases. She sees the exact moment that the words hit the Commander: Lexa inflates with the phrase, brightens and struggles to restrain her smile. She’s beautiful. It is the lightest Clarke has ever seen her – the lightest Clarke has ever felt.
She should know by now: that feeling never lasts.
It happens fast. There is movement in the trees – a glimpse of a shadow in Clarke’s peripheral vision, barely a thing at all – and if she was younger and newer to the ground Clarke might think it to be nothing. A trick of the light. Clarke is not younger, and she has been here too long; she does not believe in simple shadows. Lexa parts her lips to respond (“I already have”, probably – god forbid), and Clarke’s eyes scan the trees for another twitch and find instead a glint of metal.
‘Grounders!’
It rips out of her before she has the chance to think of anything else – learned in the weeks alone by the drop ship, a hundred kids abandoned on the ground to die. It means something different now – should mean something different with an alliance and a comradeship behind it – but at first it meant “savages” and “enemies” and “imminent attack”. She knows that her friends will hear it as a warning and drop to the ground, or flee into the trees, draw weapons and save themselves.
Lexa doesn’t. She jerks to a stop, jaw snapping closed – confused, interrupted, probably wondering if it’s a slur. She works through it quickly – and Clarke can see it in her eyes: understanding, panic, rage, all in that order – but not quickly enough. Metal shifts in the distance and Clarke jerks around and shoves the Commander aside. She doesn’t hear the twang of the bowstring or the whistle of the arrow over the rushing blood in her ears, but she feels it acutely when it buries itself in her chest. A second follows. The sensation is not unfamiliar.
Somewhere ahead of them there is gunfire – Miller or Bellamy, Clarke doesn’t know. A horn blows – low pitch, staccato, three pulls: retreat. Lexa bolts ten steps past her, looses her spear into the woods and earns a startled yelp from amidst the trees for her trouble.
She turns back, eyes blazing – and Clarke sees her, for a moment, somewhere else: swathed in furs on a beach in the cold, shield in one hand and sword in the other, panting in the aftermath of a raid; free and standing tall on the prow of a ship, hair braided, beautiful and breathing authority; cast in shadow behind a bar, dolled up, nursing a broken hand – jealous, angry; splayed on a bed in a shitty hotel – all they could get on short notice – dark eyes and red lips that whisper “come here, love” and coax Clarke across the room; spitting out angry words in a small apartment that they share – so hurt, so in love; coated in dirt and body armour and outlined by desert and blood, just as gorgeous as she was in the beginning and twice as deadly.
‘Oh,’ she whispers, and Lexa stares at her, horrified, metres between them, lifetimes apart. Words bubble up in Clarke’s throat but when she parts her lips to speak them blood spills out instead. She remembers another war in another time – a rough brogue to her words that feels familiar and foreign all at the same time, handing out orders and expecting them to be followed: the clash, the hiss, the fire, and blood in her mouth. This is not the first time.
Lexa sees Clarke’s knees give out and Clarke sees everything.
Cold fingers scrabble at the shafts protruding from her sternum, and it is only the years of Abby’s tutelage that stop her from yanking either of them free. She coughs and tastes metal. Her body jerks with the effort. Strong arms come around her and move her to sit properly on the ground and Clarke frowns in confusion at the warm hands that move her own away, but smiles when she sees the source. Lexa has closed the distance to catch her.
‘You’ll be fine,’ the Commander says stiffly – but the Commander is gone, and there is only Lexa left looking at her now, a hint of fear and tears in her eyes. Clarke reaches up with shaking fingers to touch her face, and the Grounder just barely leans into it. ‘We’re going to get you home.’
Heavy footsteps approach, and it hardly draws the brunette’s attention – whether because she knows the gait or because she simply doesn’t care, Clarke can’t tell. Indra comes first with the two Grounders, and Lexa barely spares them a glance. Bellamy and Octavia follow, Lincoln and Miller bringing up the rear. They jerk to a halt the second they see Clarke.
‘Find the attackers. Bring them to me – alive,’ Lexa orders, all iron and rage and blazing eyes – and it is this moment, more than any medical experience of her own, that lets Clarke know for certain that she will not live through this. ‘They will die slowly.’
(Lexa will burn them until their screams die down, douse the flames and burn them again.)
‘Lexa,’ she sputters, earning a sharp glare from the woman above her as Indra and the two men disappear into the trees. ‘If this is my last life, I am glad that I have known you.’
It slams into Lexa with more force than Clarke expects; the Commander has been dropping hints about past lives and past loves for all the time they’ve known each other and they both know it, but it is a very different thing to say it back – to acknowledge it. They are more than these weeks together – they are larger than one lifetime. And Clarke remembers.
‘We’re going to get you home,’ Lexa repeats, somewhere between her practiced stone façade, a smile, and tears. ‘You’ll be fine.’ Then, ‘I only just found you.’
Clarke shakes her head, and feels a little more of her blood wetting her lips. She knows better. So does Lexa.
‘Lung’s punctured,’ she says simply. ‘Nearest camp is more than an hour away. I’ll drown before then – if it doesn’t collapse entirely.’
She pauses and feels the damp rasp of her breath, and Lexa glares down at her and curses – gods, stars, anything she can think of. Clarke traces her furrowed brow in hopes to smooth it. The lines are familiar – she doesn’t remember it, but it is a motion that she has followed before. Lexa stills Clarke’s hand with her own and presses it to warm lips.
‘Look after my people, okay?’ Clarke says, and smiles at the vigour of Lexa’s nod. ‘And my mom. Trust Bellamy – and Octavia, and Raven. They’re good people, they can help you. Make the peace last for the next life.’
‘For every lifetime,’ Lexa promises. ‘I will keep alliances and make more. I’ll crush mountains and build cities. I would run rivers red to bring you back to me. I’d build you a home if you would stay.’
Clarke wants to say yes – wants to give in to the offer and the sad smile that accompanies it – but that would be lying.
‘I’m sorry I left you alone so long,’ she says instead, and Lexa kisses her knuckles to hide her scowl. ‘I got lost in the stars. But I know where to find you now.’
Someone shifts around them, and then Bellamy is kneeling by her other side and taking her free hand, and Octavia drops down beside him, eyes wet and jaw wired shut. Clarke tries for a close-mouthed smile, and Lexa’s fingers wipe the blood from her lips.
‘We’ve got you, Princess,’ Bellamy says. Clarke squeezes his fingers in hers for a moment and releases them, and with that reassurance he draws a knife from his belt. Clarke’s hand doesn’t stay empty for long; Octavia takes it between both of her own, lifts it to her lips and presses “we’re here, we’re right here with you” into paling skin. Lexa runs gentle fingers through blonde hair, and Clarke has never – in any of her lifetimes – loved anyone as much as these three right now.
‘The throat,’ she says. ‘Like I showed you. Clean. Make it quick.’
‘I remember,’ he mutters. ‘I’ll even sing you to sleep.’
She watches the way his throat bobs when he swallows, and hopes he will be the last of her friends to do this – to kill someone they love in the name of mercy. They are too good for this. Too sweet. She wishes she could live longer, if only to lift the weight from their shoulders.
‘Your fight is over,’ Lexa whispers in the grounder tongue, and kisses Clarke’s fingers.
‘May we meet again,’ she tells them all.
Bellamy is quick with the knife, but he doesn’t sing to her– doesn’t have to. Lexa hums, and strokes her hair, and the notes dance in her ears and whisper in her head while she shudders and chokes, and blood floods her throat – and when the darkness closes in it feels a lot like coming home.
It is not the first time. It will not be the last.