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I found you.
I should’ve found you sooner, she thought as she lay awake that night. I could’ve stopped you, I could’ve. I should’ve. If we’d just gotten there sooner… Eighteen people were dead. Eighteen people. Elders, men, women, children. All unarmed.
She didn’t sleep that night.
I’m in love with you.
Timing had never been in their favor. Those words would’ve been something beautiful before. Now the butterflies in her stomach had wings of razor blades, tearing her apart as they flew.
Ever since the village, she’d been looking to blame anyone but him. The people, for charging. He had them penned up like animals. They’re a proud people. They were unarmed. Murphy, for not stopping him. What did you want him to do, shoot him? He tried to. Herself, for not getting there sooner, for being his cause, the crusade he was on. Innocents died in the Crusades, too.
There was no going back after this. Not for any of them. Not with people on both sides clamoring for his death. Half of her understood, agreed, even. One death to save hundreds of lives. One death to pay for eighteen deaths. How could she deny that?
Her heart ached at the thought. If she did this, how was she any better than her mother, who turned her father in? How was she any better than the council that decided to sacrifice 100 teenagers to keep the Ark going for a few more weeks? How could she sacrifice the boy she loved-
But he wasn’t just a boy anymore. The peacemaker she’d known had been warped by the loss of her. Something had been broken, and they were cutting themselves to pieces trying to piece it back together.
She loved him still, but being in love with him was too painful to imagine. It wasn’t I love you but I don’t like you, like it was with Bellamy, it wasn’t I love you but I can’t respect what you did, like with her mother, it was I love you but not what you became. The love she had for him was blood-soaked and full of bullet holes, it was real and present but it was killing her.
Be careful.
She knew what he was going to do, but she didn’t want to believe it. It wasn’t until he stepped out into the open that she had to face it. The scream tore her throat open but out of fear, not shock.
She watched the grounders drag him away and heard her conversation with Murphy echo through her head.
“You were with him.”
“I tried to stop him.”
“Not hard enough.”
I didn’t try hard enough.
Take me instead,
she’d told Lexa. She’d killed Atom, watched Charlotte leap, burned hundreds of warriors, left 47 of her people in Mount Weather. What were 18 more deaths to carry?
Let me say goodbye.
Raven had given her the knife so she could save Finn. That’s what she was doing, wasn’t it?
I love you too.
Finally she spoke the words that belonged to the children they’d been- the spacewalker and the princess. Words that belonged to those whose hands weren’t soaked with blood, who could look at each other and see hope, not death, who could look at the world and see beauty, not destruction. Words for those whose shoulders weren’t heavy with lives they’d taken.
She would carry them all. Each of the 100 they’d lost, the ones in the mountain, the grounders on the bridge, the ones she’d burned, even the 300 volunteers of the Ark. She would carry them all with her. She would carry every single person that died in Lincoln’s village- the eighteen Finn had killed, and the boy he’d been, the person he lost a grip on when he did it. She would carry both of his deaths with her.
She walked away, aware of the way each grounder stared at her, aware that she’d just stolen something from them. She was made of ash and blood and bone, but she kept walking. Somehow, she kept going.