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You have been called a liar and a cheat and a criminal.
You are none of these things - no, you are all of these things. But you are also a goddamned fool. You’re a fool and you’re blindfolded in hell and it’s all because you fell for a blue eyed, dark haired baby girl when you were six years old and then a blue eyed, blonde haired princess at twenty two. Pain wracks through every inch of your body and blood is flowing out of you like water from a tap and you have no plan, no idea to help you out of this situation. You feel like your eyes are on fire and your skin is peeling from your bones and yet all you can think about is her.
You see her face when she told you she was weak (she is not, she is strong and she is brave and she is defiant; weak she is not). You think of the girl who condemned you to hell - one of only two on this earth that you would go to hell for - because she could and you know that you are a goddamn fool because you went. You walked straight into the fiery (or icy, you don’t even know anymore) depths of dystopia just because it was her wish.
And the worst thing is that she did not repent.
And the worst thing is that you do not regret.
You would do it again and again and again just to see the firelight dance in her eyes one last time with her skin brushing against yours, pushing a piece of paper into your hand.
(Because picturing her saying “it’s worth it” is better than not seeing her at all).
You are a fool not because you walked straight into the devil’s arms for the love of a girl with other ideas, but because you would do it continuously, blindly allowing him to torture at you, clench your heart and decimate your soul again and again until there is nothing left to destroy.
You are fool because you would fight for her until your death, and she would do nothing more than send you on the express route. You are strung upside down when you first wake, with pads attached to you, robbing you of your blood and life.
You have become a human blood bag and a girl stands before you, speaking of the 47 children you seek to save. She speaks of Jasper and you speak of Clarke and her very name throws your body off balance because you cannot manage to hate her, even as you are lowered to the floor and professedly dead, even when you steal the air from a man’s lungs to fuel your own, all whilst looking him in the eye and watching as his face turns blue. You cannot hate her, and you cannot hate yourself either.
Later, when you see a tiny boy with the same name on his backpack as the one you tore from the uniform on your back, (Lovejoy, the irony. You swear those seven letters and two faces will never leave the back of your eyelids), you repent and you regret, but you still do not hate Clarke Griffin. Even as the little boy speaks to you of his father, the very same man whose life you stole to keep yourself alive. What are the odds, that the one child who would speak to you from a whole class would be the one whose father you have just murdered. (What are the odds that you probably murdered that same child later on, just for the hunger of having your hand on hers, to take the burden of the pain from her back onto your own).
You cannot hate her, though you suspect she would not do the same for you.
You are expendable, she has admitted as much. And yet you persist with burrowing further into hell for her.
When the doors lock on the kids that are yours, your heart stops beating. You just wanted to see them, and then Jasper appears at the door. You cannot look anymore, as his desperate eyes lap up Maya’s face and your silhouette, your head turned away, against everything you are fighting for. You go to the control room to call home, a home that is not yours, not really.
When you get through, Clarke’s voice is the first you hear, and you swear you’re in Eden even as you stand in your own dystopia. When you say her name, it is not a question (you know that voice better than you know your own, after all). It is a desperate plea to the gods you stopped believing in 16 years ago and everyone around you that it is her, that she is okay (even as it is you standing eye-to-eye with death himself).
She is, and when she says your name in the same tone, your heart soars for a whole 8 seconds because she cares. She gives a damn about you in this hell and she’s actually showing it, and then her voice changes to business as you wonder just how you’re going to get yourself and 47 children around you out of this goddamned jail, this hell on earth (you wonder mundanely if hell is just a concept for what earth once was, what it will inevitably become again soon if the council and the mountain have their way).
When you sign off, your heart feels a tiny bit heavier than it did before and Maya notices, because she places a hand covertly on your arm and then its done with, you’re leaving before guards find you and realise that you’re not one of them - that you’re an imposter in a dead man’s shirt (it feels like that’s all you really are, recently). The hope had dripped from Clarke’s voice with every word that came in your own.
What seems like years later, you finally see Clarke and you swear your heart drops into your stomach and below, down onto the floor and into the dark depths of the mountain, because the girl you’re looking at - it’s not Clarke. This isn’t the girl who looked at the earth like she believed it was everything right instead of everything wrong; who looked at a killer and saw a protector, a good person. This isn’t the girl you met when you first fell to the ground like a lost star.
And you hate the council for it. And you hate Finn for it. You hate everyone that died and everyone that didn’t but you hate yourself most of all - you allowed this. You said it yourself - she looked at a killer and saw a protector, but where were you? Why didn’t you protect her? On a level, you even hate her, because goddamn she let herself care this much about people and she shouldn’t have.
She cared so much about people that she cared nothing about you or herself (some days, you feel like she’s just an extension of yourself).
You want to hug her, you want to hold her tighter than you’ve ever held anyone but you don’t. You hold onto your sister like she’s the last thing keeping you tethered to the ground (she is) and you watch as Jasper and Monty embrace the changed blonde. You meet her eyes over Octavia’s shoulder and your heart sprouts from your mouth when you see the emptiness within them.
Later, you’ll watch her race through hallways to save kids that you once tried to turn against her - once tried to claim that she didn’t care about. You know now that you were wrong (like you didn’t then), and you know that even if you wanted to turn these kids against her you couldn’t. You can see it in her eyes.
She would die for them - she would kill for them.
She is standing in this hell with you facing a man who tried to kill her and then helped her and she is threatening his son with unthinkable things. You tell her no and she doesn’t listen (you should have known - she never does), and this is the first time you’ve ever felt sorry for letting her take the reins in your leadership. You did this, you practically handed the gun over to her and now she’s embedded a bullet into the chest of an almost innocent man for the sake of a guilty one. Then the man on the other side of the radio threatens Clarke’s mother and you see the fear in her eyes, the fear that nobody else can read, like a foreign script on home paper.
She threatens him on a bigger scale then, for the children and the adults and everyone they care about that he has locked up in a room just beyond their reach. She threatens to kill his people if he does not let go of hers and you can hear his laboured breathing on the other side of the line. He’s thinking about it. There’s no remorse in her voice and this girl - this woman - has just murdered his father to prove a point, he knows that Clarke is not bluffing.
There is no remorse in Clarke’s voice, no, but God if you can see it in her eyes, deep down inside them you see her morals shaking and her world falling through the cracks. She’s going against everything she believes in and she believes in a lot.
She believed in a lot.
Her voice becomes a plea then, as she tries to negotiate with the man whose father lays dead on the floor at her feet. She sees his weakness on the CCTV screens and you see her weakness in high definition. She doesn’t want anyone else to die.
She doesn’t want to be a murderer.
Then again, who does?
“They’re coming for us.” She says and like lightning you offer up a solution. Monty sorts it out as Clarke just stares at the screen. You see what she sees. These people aren’t people anymore.
They’re potential victims. Collateral damage in a war that will never end if it doesn’t end now.
Now she’s talking about killing a whole level of the mountain and you’re having to be the logical one (which never works, look how that worked with Finn). You’re telling her to wait, but she doesn’t show any sign of relenting.
There are kids on that floor.
You see it in her eyes.
I know.
It’s then that you realise she’ll do it.
People who helped us.
It’s then that you realise you will too, if she wants you to.
Then give me another option.
You’re quiet then. You can’t, because there isn’t one. Both sides cannot win a war, no matter which way you dress it up.
Either you don’t walk out of this, or they don’t.
Then Cage is having Clarke’s mother carried to the table, and Kane is protesting - they’re all protesting, but it’s Clarke you have your eyes on.
What have I done?
She’s like a child realising the consequences of her actions, and you want to take it all from her, you want to take the pain and the hurt and the anguish and stop it.
You can’t. So you stand there silently, waiting, praying for another solution.
Praying so Abby doesn’t die.
Praying so Clarke doesn’t fall apart.
Praying that they get out of here alive, even if you don’t.
There is no going back. You tell her, because you see in her eyes what she’s going to do.
She’s drowning in sorrow and pain and guilt and you don’t know how to stop it.
You just have to stop her.
She nods to Monty and you know you’ve lost her.
You wonder if you ever really had her.
(God, you’re a fool, Bellamy Blake).
You see your sister on the screen now, slashing and stabbing like a professional assassin.
If you weren’t so overcome with guilt that she had to do this, she had to become who she is to survive on this goddamn planet, you’d be proud.
You know that you never have to worry about killing anyone for her - she can do it herself.
That doesn't ease the burden of knowing that she’s barely seventeen years old with a machete in her hands killing men because it’s the only thing she knows to do.
It’s the only thing she can do down here, it’s the only way she’ll survive.
And you swear you’ve never felt pain like this before, watching the innocent little girl you held as a child, the baby you kissed and loved and nursed to sleep. The infant you taught to walk and took on adventures in your compartment, to whom you read books and told stories.
Who you locked under the floor every night.
That little girl is killing to survive, like on the nature shows she was too sensitive, too sweet and caring to watch without tears as a child.
They catch Jasper and you hear the hope drain from Clarke in her breath. They’re still sucking the life from her mother and Monty is still searching for a coup de grâce for the Mountain Civilians.
We’re out of time.
And Clarke’s hand falls on the lever. You can see in her eyes that she doesn’t want to do it. You can see that she’s hearing something in her head. She’s hearing words and phrases, she’s telling herself not to do it.
She’s telling herself she has to.
Her mother’s eyes are closing and your sister is being laid to the ground.
My sister, My responsibility.
Your hand falls on top of hers.
I have to save them.
Her eyes meet yours.
Together.
And your hands move as one in what you both know is genocide, mass termination of the worst kind.
You’ve killed civilians. You’ve killed innocent people in cold blood.
It had to be done.
You think of the words you said to her what seems like a lifetime ago.
Who we are and who we need to be to survive are very different things.
That doesn’t make it any easier.
Sirens are blaring and the orange is glowing on her face like the dawn of day as what she has done dawns on her - on both of you.
Your breath is falling in starts because God you’ve just killed hundreds of people and now you’re watching them die over a camera. They’re turning purple and black and one thousand shades of red as the radiation leaks into their blood, marring their insides and altering their whole appearance.
These are people you’ve met. People who’ve helped you.
Innocent people. Good people.
Dead people.
Emerson runs and you’re looking at Clarke and a room massed with dead people and her eyes are shining with tears that you know she will never let fall.
Let’s go get our people.
You stumble into the dining room first because God you’re all suckers for punishment and you see Jasper sitting on the floor with a dead girl in his arms and hatred in his eyes as they fall on the blonde girl beside you.
What did you do?
You don’t know. You don’t know what you did, you just know that you murdered innocents and that makes you no better than the common criminals on the Ark - in fact, it makes you worse, one thousand times worse.
We had no choice.
She tells him and Jasper’s crying now as he tells you what he was about to do and you justify yourself and Clarke to him.
You did the right thing.
This is what you tell yourself.
Abby’s eyes lock on yours over Clarke’s shoulder as you overhear their conversation.
I tried. I tried to be the good guy.
Clarke’s hands are shaking, her shoulders are shaking - her whole body is shaking as she tries to justify herself to the one person she cares more about than anyone alive in the world.
Maybe there are no good guys.
You think this is the truth, because you’d always written yourself as the good guy in your story. You were the protagonist always, the one who would fight the dragon and save the girl and ride off into the sunset on a white horse.
But not in this story. In this story you were the dragon, or at least half of it; in this story, you won’t ride away into the sunset or save the girl.
You won’t even save yourself.
You’re walking back to camp now, and you’re telling yourself that everything will be okay. Even if you don’t belong here, you’ll stay for the kids, though they have their own families. You’ll stay for Octavia, though you’re sure she’ll leave soon with Lincoln.
You’ll stay for Clarke.
You find, when the last stragglers are coming through the gate you’re holding open, that she will not do the same for you.
You watch from the gate as she hugs Monty, who’s as tearful as you’ve ever seen him (he has a right to be. He has just lost his best friend, his brother). And then Monty walks in, and she doesn’t.
She stands outside the gate and she stares at the metal structure behind you like it’s her death sentence (and you think that once, it was).
So you walk out to her, you reach out more than you have before. You meet her eyes as you get next to her and you see the guilt in them.
You see what she’s done.
What you’ve done.
She tells you she’s leaving. You tell her you can forgive her - she needs to come back.
I need you.
You say it with your eyes, the words that aren’t ready to be said. She receives them, she understands.
She ignores. She smiles tearfully, because she knows.
You want to tell her. The words are ripping through your throat and into your mouth like bile when there’s nothing left to reject from your body.
You bite them back, because there’s nothing that will stop her now, you realise. She kisses your cheek and then she hugs you, with her head fitting onto your shoulder and your arms wrapping around her with less hesitation than before.
She’s leaving, Clarke’s leaving.
And you can’t leave with her. You don’t entertain the thought for a second, because the kids are going to struggle without Clarke; you can’t leave them like that.
You just hope she comes back.
Deep down, you know that one day she will, as she utters may we meet again.
It takes her walking away for you to say it back, the words she needs to hear, because different ones had beat them to your lips. But you swallowed your truth away and replaced them with her lies.
May we meet again.
You have been called a liar and a cheat and a criminal.
You are none of these things - no, you are all of these things. But you are also a goddamned fool. You’re a fool and you’ve been left behind in hell and it’s all because you fell in love with a blue eyed, blonde haired princess who will never forgive herself. Pain seeps through cracks in your mind that you never knew were there and you feel like you’ve been doused in cold water because she’s gone, she’s really gone. That’s a thought you haven’t entertained since the day you met her, you never thought Clarke Griffin would leave your side and you don’t know when the idea of her sticking around started to be a good one, but it did, (maybe it always was) and now you feel lost and alone more than you ever have because God, on some days she was all you had and now she’s gone, ripped away like everything else.
You see her face when she pulled the lever, with her hand underneath yours. You think of the girl who first landed on this earth with a smile on her face and wonder in her eyes and you wonder exactly destroyed her, or whether it’s a combination of all the right events and wrong happenings.
And the worst thing is that she’ll never be how she was.
And the worst thing is that you won’t either.
You’ve been to hell and back again for this girl and your friends and you’d do it again and again. And now she’s leaving. She’s leaving you all alone and you don’t know what to do - where to go from here.
You don’t even know if you have anywhere to go to.
Still, you would do it again and again and again just to see the sunlight play in her hair one last time with her lips brushing against your cheek, her arms around your shoulders, holding you like she’ll never let go, even as she says goodbye.
(Because picturing her saying “may we meet again” is better than not seeing her at all).