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"I bear it, so they don't have to."
She started with the children. She buried them on the hill, covered in wildflowers, crafting a triangle for each from metal, or splintered wood, one triangle to mark every heartbreakingly small grave.
On her seventh day of digging, after twenty-three children had been put into the soil, she reluctantly succumbed to her reality. Lacking supplies, and unprepared to die on the mountain leaving this job unfinished, she began sleeping in the dorms.
It was odd, being able to freely come and go from a place she had once so desperately tried to flee. She traced the uneven scar on her arm, remembering the feeling of Maya's artery pulsing at the end of the shard of glass in her hand. Clarke tried to remember what it felt like to be so sure that what you were doing was right - to know, somehow, that whatever it took to get out of that mountain would be worth it.
***
Mount Weather is immense, and it seemed like there was no end to the carnage. Clarke tried to count the bodies, retrieving Dante's from the command center. She knew she couldn't go down to Reaper tunnels, not without a tone generator, but she loathed her inability to retrieve Lovejoy's body. She'd wanted to bury Lovejoy next to his son; after Bellamy had told her the story of meeting the boy, she realized it had affected him more than she'd thought. She imagined he felt somewhat like Chancellor Jaha when it had happened, being hit with the sudden realization that he'd orphaned someone simply because their parent stood in his way.
The other children, though, she'd been able to identify. She was able to mark fifty or so graves with the little name patches she had pulled off of their backpacks, affixing them to their triangle markers. Halfway through the work, though, she realized it didn't matter whose graves were and weren't marked - or even if they were marked correctly. In her estimation, there would be nearly six times as many unmarked graves as there were marked ones, but they would all remain unmourned. It dawned on her that every last person who could have mourned the citizens of Mount Weather was dead. Rather, she had killed them.
It only made her work faster.
***
After she finished with all the children she could find - upwards of a hundred, in ten rows - she saw that there wouldn't be enough space on the hillside for many more graves. Her hands, callused and blistered, broken and healed and callused over again, were hard now, aching, and chronically bent as though a shovel were always in her grasp. After a day's rest for her weakened body (and a scouting mission that yielded a second, larger, and equally picturesque burial site), she returned to digging.
She'd lost track of time long ago, no longer marking day and night, only counting body, after body, after body. Sometimes, dangerously, she let her mind wander.
One day, as it wandered, she ended up thinking about all the people she knew who would never have graves - who would never have even the simplest of honors in being returned to the Earth that humanity had worked so hard to return to.
There were no graves for the lives lost in space, of course - no burial rites or markers for her father, or for the families of so many of her friends - for Octavia and Bellamy's mother, for Charlotte's parents, for Murphy's father who died for the crime of stealing medicine for his sick son. No graves or tombs or markers for the 320 people whose lives had been taken for oxygen that hadn't even been needed. There was no marker in remembrance where Charlotte had died, or all the people from the Ark who had crashed to Earth - first in the Exodus ship, and then in the fragmented stations of the Ark itself. How horrible it was to think that those who had been left behind had nowhere they could go to mourn those losses.
Of course, no one had been left behind when Clarke's victims at Mount Weather had fallen, but she dug nonetheless. She had killed them, hundreds of them, because it had come down to saving her people or letting them die. But when she closed her eyes, she saw Finn, and wondered if he had used the same rationale to himself as he'd looked for her. How she wished she could show him this, the monster she'd become, how the five hundred people she'd killed were nothing to his nineteen.
It hurt even more, then, realizing that Finn had killed for her, only for her to kill even more. He had been right about them. She heard his words as they echoed in her mind: Maybe this is who we are now.
***
In the new valley, she dug a hole for Dante Wallace. She was content to let Cage rot where he had fallen, in the woods at Lincoln's hands, anonymous and alone. But Dante Wallace had been a good man, once. Maybe he had been all along, and she the villain - she didn't know anymore.
After she'd laid Dante's body in the ground he had so ached to see for half a century, and covered him with the dirt - that was the hardest part, every time, covering what had once been a human being with soil, watching them be swallowed by the ground until they disappeared - she set to work carving the sign for his grave:
"Dante Wallace, last President of Mount Weather.
I bear it so they don't have to."
***
Clarke woke up, as always, with her hands clenched and aching, her throat sore and rasping from screaming in the night. She was nearing the end of what she was sure Bellamy would have called her penance. She thought of it only as another duty.
Over 200 bodies had been buried, but she'd only had enough information to mark about a fourth of those graves. Mrs. Ryan and Mr. and Mrs. Peters, Lee, and Fox (one of her own, another Arker she'd failed to save) were the most recent graves she'd dug, eight or nine hours ago. The bodies had long since stopped resembling people, but she'd made shrouds for the ones she couldn't bear to look at.
Today, she had to do what she had been putting off since day one - burying Vincent and Maya Vie. She'd already carved the headstone - a joint one made of a piece of old plastic she'd recovered. She wanted the marker to last, at least to give Jasper somewhere to come and say goodbye. She'd managed to etch the plastic with their names, and the words, "revolutionaries, heroes, and friends". Once Maya and her father were in the ground, Clarke knew, she would be able to finish the rest.
***
Clarke breathed a sigh of relief. The end was in sight. Only a couple dozen more holes to be dug, and none for anyone she had known in life. Suddenly, a critical thought struck her. Where would she go? Once her job here was finished, she had no idea what to do. She had been hiding from the teams sent from Camp Jaha (surely by her mother, as Bellamy had been angry and hurt, but willing to let her go), though she knew whether or not anyone had seen her, Abby must have been notified of the makeshift cemetery by now.
After one particularly long trip, a team from camp had set up for the night in Mount Weather to sleep, so Clarke had snuck back to the dropship and slept there. The cold metal on her skin was almost unbearable, though, and there was nothing in the way of supplies in their old camp anymore.
Forty-some graves later, the next time the Arkers (this time, a hunting party, not one sent by Abby to find her daughter) had decided to stay the night in the mountain bunker, she had headed for the hatch Finn had found.
When she'd first arrived, she had braced herself for the smell of the rotting Grounder corpse that had been Finn's first kill. But when she dropped into the bunker, there was no smell, and no Grounder. Clarke wasn't worried about where it had gone; she was sure Lexa had sent someone to retrieve the body. She was a bit disappointed, though, not to have been able to bury him too. He was, after all, killed for her father's watch. Maybe she deserved some of the blame for Finn's nineteen kills as well as her own.
***
By the time she'd returned to Mount Weather the next day, the Camp Jaha hunting party had left, taking supplies with them. They'd left something, though, something they'd never done before - the liquor bottle, full of Finn's ashes that her mother had once tried to give her.
Clarke was right, her mother knew exactly where she was.
***
With the last grave dug, and the last body interred, Clarke packed what she could, for whatever would come next. Finn's ashes were still in her pack. It hadn't seemed right to sprinkle them on the cemetery she'd created - and caused the need to create - when it would have troubled Finn so much, the person she'd become.
"If you need forgiveness, I can give you that," Bellamy had once told her, no doubt remembering when she'd once similarly absolved him. She yearned to fight by Bellamy's side again, but without a war to wage, she didn't know if next to him was even her place anymore.
"This is what I am now," Clarke whispered to the empty air. She was born for battle, just like Lexa had said. Her voice had been so silent so long that the sound of it startled her.
Far off in the distance, she heard a shout, probably some Grounder. Clarke took that as a sign to move out. Half a day later, in the relative safety of Finn's bunker, she curled up on the couch with Bellamy's gun, and for the first time in three months, she let herself cry.