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Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.
How could she have been so fucking stupid? Brave Clarke, you impressed them all with your fighting skills. Smart Clarke, you won them all over with you brilliant plan. Pretty Clarke, you made big badass Clexa fall for you.
She had felt powerful, she had felt part of something bigger, an army at her side ready to strike and it was all going to finally end well – and then nothing. Fucking nothing. Nothing of all that had ever been hers at all.
And the worst part? Right now all she was feeling was childish shame. Shame at having been so thoroughly used up and discarded that she wasn't even surprised that all of the Ark people had just turned around and left. Had they really even believed in her? Poor fools.
She wanted to run, bury herself in the deepest ground hole she could find and never come back again. She wanted people to forget she ever existed. She wanted to forget there had ever been people that needed her.
Was this how Bellamy had felt back then, when all those people on the Ark died because of his ignorance and fear? So disgusted with himself to try and run away even from Octavia?
That night he had picked up all of his broken pieces and thrown them away. He had let go of the man he had tried to become, the uncaring hard-hearted predator he had so wished to be, because THAT kind of man doesn't suffer, doesn't have regrets.
Bellamy came back to camp as his naked self, the boy who grew up knowing nothing else in life but to protect his baby sister. Just like that, he embraced all of their people and spent every single day since then fighting for them. He had gone into the mountain and done every single stupid thing she'd told him, he had WON it, but they still had lost. Because of her. Because she chose to pick up his scepter, and her mother's too, because she thought she could do better.
And what right did she have now to surrender? It couldn't be over.
Just, what did you do when the broken pieces were already all you had ever been?
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“I am doing the best I can!”
“Well, it's not enough”
Maybe Octavia was right. Right now what they needed was her WORST.
And when Bellamy just opens the doors to the mountain, she can't even look him in the eye. Because she knows that this time there won't be his “you did the right thing” or “it had to be done” to keep her from drowning.
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“Remember that we are the good guys” her mom had said. But her dad and 300 innocent people and countless others had fallen to earth like shooting stars.
“Love is weakness” Lexa had said. But it was the love for her people that gave her the strength to trash whoever stood on the way to their safety, not her mind.
“If we do this, there is no going back” Bellamy says. Because what difference there is between killing THEIR children to save YOUR people from being drained to death, and drain to death THEIR people to save YOUR children from dying?
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Cage doesn't believe her. He wavers, when she shouts into the radio with false proudness and despair that SHE DID let the people in TonDC die, and if she killed her allies did he really think she would spare their tormenters?
Dante, oh Dante believes her. He was just begged for help, from none other than the man who destroyed every single one of the mountain’s defenses. Help to stop HER from killing all of HIS people. Clarke doesn't know if she should be delighted or horrified by the fear in his eyes, the fear of HER.
Bellamy knows, and now it's him who can't look her in the eye. She just can't decide if it's shame for what she's becoming, or shame for himself because in the end he won’t stop her.
This time, she's the one with the nail and he's the one who watches.
Radiation burns friends and foe alike, and it burns her too from the inside out.
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Her mom dies like Finn, like her dad, like all the people whose lives were put alone on the plate of a balance, opposites the lives of the many. She dies listening to her daughter becoming a monster, and maybe a savior. She dies to the first and last kiss from a man who has loved her too much, and chose silence and loneliness as his expiation.
It’s with grim satisfaction that she delivers Cage in the hands of Lincoln. Blood must have blood. One hundred years of it, and the grounders will be sated.
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“I can’t forgive you.” Never be said that with the Blakes you didn’t know where you stood.
“I know, Bellamy.” He sits down next to her, like that night so long ago, and she envies the people they were back then.
“It wouldn’t make any difference, you don’t want it anyway”
She has no response to that.
“This went much better when you did the talking”
That at least makes her cough up a teary laugh.
“We still need you, no matter in how many pieces you are”
“They are scared of me, Bellamy. I AM scared of myself. I don’t know what I’m capable of anymore”
“Good.”
“How is that any good?”
“Because till you’re scared, you will keep trying to come up with a better solution. When you start thinking that you’re right, that’s when we won’t need you anymore”
“That’s the most fucked up speech you’ve ever given”
“This is the most fucked up we’ve ever been. Did it work?”
“No. Maybe. What do you want from me, Bellamy?”
His hand reaching out for her is his only reply. Palm up, he waits. Take or leave, Clarke. She slides her trembling hand over his, the very same hand covered in the blood of innocents, and she’s afraid of touching him. His hold is strong and warm, and maybe, just maybe, there is still hope.