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this is the girl she used to be, the girl she's cut to tatters: good. compassionate. brimming with conviction.
or maybe it's just that until the mountain, she'd never been pushed far enough to let all her monsters loose. maybe she'd been too aware of eyes on her, of everyone counting on her, of needing to be someone better than she knew herself to be so her people could be better than they knew themselves to be.
maybe she'd actually been that better person, right up until she'd needed to be much, much worse.
she leaves her trust with bellamy and her empathy with monty and her smile with raven. she leaves friendship with octavia and faith with jasper and acceptance with her mother. she wrenches them out of herself, claws them free and tosses them bloody on the ground at their feet, and she walks away with a soul left stripped and skeletal.
she has her hands, which pulled two levers and cut a man's throat and shot others dead. she has her mouth, silent when it could have saved two hundred and fifty lives. she has her spine, so straight and strong as she took her mother's power and broke it over her knee. she has her feet, which ran to finn and stumbled from his corpse, which carried her from mount weather and back again, which stood rooted in place as a girl she might've loved turned away, taking hope with her.
and she has two or three slivers of clarke griffin, the pieces of her rooted too deep to cut out or burn away.
it's enough. she makes it be enough. she rebuilds herself, bit by bit, until one day she sees butterflies and everything in her goes still and yearning and quiet. until one night the flowers glow and it's good, and her hands touch them gently and nothing burns. until she finds herself humming as she walks and doesn't immediately go silent, the notes stoppered up by shame, because she takes that shame and bends it like a shield around her song. until she stands up straight in defiance of nothing, all that weight slipping from her shoulders and into her bones, settling there like gravity, like inevitability, no longer something she carries but something she's become.
she rebuilds herself with the memory of staggering into the dropship clearing, of writing on the wall, of flinging the dust of her dead into anya's eyes and smashing anya's head with the charred skull of her conquered. she rebuilds herself with her oldest, unwavering grief, for her father and the parts of her he took with him into space. she rebuilds herself with every fresh mourning: atom and wells, charlotte and finn, fox and maya. lexa flinching from the bones she made of three hundred warriors, jasper clinging to the girl she killed, long rows of the nameless dead torn apart by the air she breathed into their lungs.
she rebuilds herself with indra's thoughtful stare and a map to polis and weeks resting in the home of her betrayer.
she carries a gun, the one she held as she hugged monty and kissed bellamy's cheek; she can feel them solid and warm against her when her finger's on the trigger and carl emerson's bleeding out at her feet. she digs his grave with her bare hands and takes his rifle and his bullets before she lowers him into it, because there will always be quints and emersons. she is the destroyer of worlds, and blood must have blood.
she doesn't smile if she doesn't mean it, so she doesn't smile at all. she stands tall when grounders shy away from the monster in their midst, as she learns this new person she's molded out of horror and beauty and loneliness and the buried roots of who she used to be.
she walks to polis for understanding, an equal and knowing heart, and then she walks again until her feet take her back to where she began.
she collects some of those scraps of herself she left behind, stained and not quite her own anymore, takes back whatever her people are willing to return. her smile from raven, her empathy from monty. her trust from bellamy, stronger and less frayed than when she left. she stitches them together, sews up the holes where friendship and faith used to be and leaves acceptance where it belongs, in the only hands that can hold it close and keep it safe.
and she wears the girl she used to be like a coat, something to keep her warm when the air's gone cold, something to shrug off when she needs to be the fire she sets to the world.