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They walk for miles. On an exciting day they fight off radioactive animals. Normally it is quiet but for the brush of wind through the trees.
Clarke was pushed to her breaking point. How can you accept that you made the hard decisions, that you made the right decisions, when everyone was dead anyway? She tries to blame Lexa, pushes her against trees, takes a swing at her. Every time Clarke loses it, Lexa is infuriatingly methodical about disarming her. She pins her until the fire in her cools to barely contained embers. It’s never hard, or bruising, but just enough to keep her there, to contain her. Clarke fights it with her life, straining each time, hurting herself worse than anything Lexa does trying to restrain her.
The one time she landed a hit on Lexa they both froze, Clarke in confusion and Lexa shutting down all emotion as she walked away. Clarke shouted after her, tried to follow, but Lexa still knows forests better than Clarke, knows how to get away, and Clarke was filled with something even worse: emptiness and terrifying isolation. Lexa found her hours later as she was setting up camp, slips into the bedroll with her, back to back.
“I’m sorry,” Clarke had whispered, feeling relief mixed with shame over her wildly tilting emotions.
“You’re getting faster,” Lexa whispered back, voice heavy with concealed emotions. She moved her hand behind her and settled it on Clarke’s hip, and that was the end of it.
You crossed a line, Clarke hears in her mind, again and again and again the condemnation of her mother joining the disappointment she sees in her father’s eyes every time she dreams. Her father would never have done that. Her father would never risk people the way she did. Her mind is haunted by the lives she took, either directly or indirectly, and she knows she would have been dead without Lexa, would have given in to the mind-numbing despair.
Most days the guilt is so consuming she feels that she should be. She tries to convince Lexa to abandon her, asks her why she won’t.
Lexa looks at her with eyes that are steady, placid, calm. Holds her shoulders down when she lashes out, waking screaming from a nightmare. Lexa is her pillar when she is falling down.
Death came swiftly for them. She should have made a different choice, made some move. She should have been able to fix it, to control it. It all follows the same basic plot: an eye for an eye becomes a limb for a limb and next thing they knew everything was empty. Two of the greatest leaders on the continent, heirs to the throne of nothing and no one.
Lexa holds her through the night and their shivering, their trembling echoes into one another until they are but a mass of waking terrors and fitful sobs. Lexa buries her nose into Clarke’s neck and breathes, breathes hard and deep, too deep, and she can feel her jaw muscles tightening and relaxing against her.
Lexa is her pillar, but even pillars crack. She fears she is breaking Lexa, testing that unwavering font of strength, and tries, tries so hard on the days she can, to give back what she takes.
“We made the right choice,” Clarke lies to her, lies for both of them, and the quick widening of her eyes is all she gets from Lexa before her lips are pressed against hers, tasting of salt and pain. The two of them push as much as they pull, the raging force of an ocean in a storm. This is new, this is a change from the monotony that has become their life. This is fresh air. This was to be expected. When she makes Lexa come, all her strength shatters around her and Clarke finally feels a sense of purpose.
They walk for miles. They fall into fits of silence coupled by fucking each other, hot and fast, against trees until they’re scraped up and bleeding and it almost hurts as much as their battered souls.
They walk, it seems, to the edge of the world, to the end and back again, and Clarke longs for the days when there was a plan B, when there was even a shred of hope. There is no new home to look forward to -- everyone is dead and they can’t hope. They simply can not hope for anything.
Sometimes Lexa is tender, so soft, and she trails her hands along Clarke and tells her they couldn’t have done anything else, that they were leaders and they make the hard decisions, and when she kisses her it is a touch of silk from a girl that is all razor wire. Lexa is a born leader, she has a spiritual faith that she was put on this Earth to make a difference. She united the twelve clans, she is a visionary. They both still have nothing. Some days, it seems like Lexa still holds on to that shred of hope. Her self-belief crumbles but still props her up, firm in her purpose in this world.
Clarke thinks she lost hers the moment the first missile struck. She looks at Lexa, starts to rearrange her priorities. She doesn’t need to be a leader, she doesn’t need to find new hope. She has Lexa, and Lexa’s belief. She knows she will never atone. Lexa, whom she has tested and punished and needed, will be her purpose.
They’re grounders. Maybe the only two left. They don’t give, and they don’t stop. They hold on. And they keep walking.