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Raven looked up when Clarke wandered into her workshop, looking dazed and slightly wild about the eyes.
“So. How’d it go?” Raven asked, already guessing that the answer would be something along the lines of, ‘really horrible.’
Clarke sank onto an empty stool, gazed blankly into space for another minute or two, then turned to Raven and said, “Oh. My. Fucking. Stars.”
“That well?”
“Ha!”
Raven smirked a bit as she bent back to her tools. “I thought you’d like being on the Council.”
“I’m not the council – thankfully! – I’m a new member of Kane’s general staff.”
Raven shrugged. “What’s the difference?”
“The council is still the governing body – though they’re calling themselves transitional right now. Figuring out how to draft a new charter, since the Exodus Charter is NEVER going to work. Their goal is to develop some sort of elected representative body, like a parliament, so the collective will of the people can be expressed and acted on.”
Raven would believe that when she saw it. As far as she’d seen, the Council liked being a secretive, semi-self-appointed, promote-from-within body. “But you’re not part of the re-write squad.”
“No! And NO THANK YOU! My mom was tearing her hair out last night over some completely wacked fight about voting systems.” Clarke shook her head. “I mean, I do get it – why it matters – but geeze. So glad I don’t have to be involved with that.”
Raven had the tinniest feeling that Clarke, busiest busy body that ever busied, wasn’t quite as glad as she declared, but let it slide.
“So you’re on Kane’s staff, not the Council.”
“Right. Kane is – and probably will be no matter what – essentially the secretary of defense. Kinda like he was on the Ark, only focused on outside threats now, not inside ones. That will be the new government’s job. Whenever they manage to get themselves up and running. In the meantime, Kane’s pretty much adopted wholesale old US/NATO army rules and regs for the remodeled Guard. He has a general staff now. I’m on that, cause he can just,” Clarke airily waved her hand, “make it so.”
“Doing what? You aren’t in charge of anything, are you? Or did they wrangle you in?”
“I’m not in charge of anything – which is good in theory, but sucks in practice.”
“Miss telling people what to do?” Raven teased.
“Yes! No!” Clarke raked her fingers through her hair and made a face, mocking her own indecision, and pushed herself to her feet, starting to pace as she tried to sort herself out “I mean, I don’t want to be in charge. I ran away and lived in the woods for three months because I didn’t want people to look to me for directions, for survival! But…” she trailed off.
“But?”
Clarke scowled. “People can be so stupid sometimes!”
Raven laughed, bending back the project on her bench. “Your lips to Gaia’s ears, girlfriend.”
Clarke hmphed.
“So what are you doing for Kane?” Raven asked after a few minutes, when she realized Clarke was neither leaving nor talking.
“I’m his new military intelligence Advisor.”
Raven looked up in surprise. “You’re shitting me.”
“I shit you not.”
“Nice work for a rich kid.”
Clarke’s chuckle had no humor in it. “I’d rather keep my day job, thanks.”
Clarke’s current day job was her medical apprenticeship, and Raven knew she was good at it. Though there was something to be said for having leadership who were – in theory at least – committed to the Hippocratic Oath of ‘do no harm.’
“Okay,” Raven said, “but I swear you told me at breakfast that you were going to a Council meeting?"
“Yeah. As Kane’s Military Intelligence Advisor.”
“So what happened?”
“There is a proposal before the council to keep all Grounders completely off the mountain except on designated days. Once or twice a month only. They wanted me,” she pointed to herself, “new military intelligence advisor, to back them. I said no. Cue two hours of lobbying me – by calling me a stupid kid in every way they could think of without using those exact words – to change my mind.”
Raven could imagine that scene pretty easily. People presenting what they thought was a reasonable proposal. Clarke rejecting it out of hand as a stupid, short-sighted mistake, and getting more and more visibly impatient and dismissive the longer they argued, less and less careful to make sure she was calling the proposal stupid, and not the people who wanted it as well.
She doubted it was worth it, but thought she’d try anyway. “The Trikaru didn’t mess around when they came to warn off Camp Jaha. They crucified three people. Like nailed them to trees, crucified. Then they planed to torture Finn to death while we all watched and listened. They strung me up and tortured me on nothing but a wild accusation. Lexa spilled her own bodyguard’s guts on the ground for what was basically a policy dispute. Lexa then abandoned us all, taking a deal with the Mountain and breaking her deal with us, because she thought it was a better offer. People here are still frightened. And horrified. And they do not trust the Woods Clan. Any of the clans. For good reason.”
“Right,” Clarke said impatiently, “And that fear resulted in Anya being shot on sight. After that it was that much harder to get any kind of alliance together to go after the Mountain Men to rescue all our people. We need greater familiarity between all the groups, not less. We won’t make it, Raven, not without them.”
Clarke raised her eyes, and Raven could tell she was in for a classic impassioned appeal. Buckle in sweetheart, she told herself, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride. She didn’t actually know which of them she was talking too. Both, probably.
“Long term,” Clarke went on, building up steam, addressing the masses that were most definitely not in here, cluttering up Raven’s workspace, “we have to build trust. Build a home with and alongside the people who already live here. There just aren’t enough of us anymore to go it alone. Hard Science. We don’t have a breeding population large enough to sustain ourselves over time. Full stop. It’s make friends. Make babies. Or die out. Every sacrifice for the last three generations will be for nothing if that happens.”
Raven raised her brows. “So, you told people who are terrified of and disgusted by their neighbors to man up and love them.”
“Pretty much.” Clarke shrugged ruefully, and wouldn't meet her eyes. Recognizing the absurdity of it all.
“Lucky you got out of there alive, much less after only two hours.”
Clarke wandered back to her stool, dragging it over and sitting down across from Raven. Raven realized she hadn’t heard the worst yet.
“Someone else introduced a different proposal, one that broke up the meeting because my mom tabled it and adjourned the Council.”
Raven cocked her head. “What’s the proposal?”
Clarke raised her face to Raven’s. Raven thought Clarke suddenly looked a million years old instead of just barely eighteen.
“Under the terms of both the old Exodus Charter and of the Unification Code – they want the Council to expel and/or execute Bellamy, Monty and me. For War Crimes. Genocide, specifically,” said Clarke.
Raven’s tools clattered to the bench. “Oh, Clarke,” she whispered.
Clarke picked up a small screwdriver, twisting it in her hands. “The thing is, they have a case. A really, really strong case.”
Raven couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Hell yeah, they had a case. They had a case under every declaration of human rights since the middle of the twentieth century.
The entire surviving population of the Mountain was dead because of what Clarke had done. Willfully and knowingly. Genocide. Open and shut. Boom.
“I could have waited. Jasper wanted to try and negotiate something else, swore if we’d let him try he could save them.” Clarke looked up then, her eyes shiny with emotion. “But they had you on the table, drilling into you! Then my mom! If I had waited, if we had waited…”
Clarke bent her head again, but she did not cry. Raven began to understand why she had stayed away. Maybe the real mystery was why she returned.
“You would have lost us,” Raven said. “We would have died. But maybe, you could have saved at least some of the Mountain Men in exchange. The many over the one. Humanity uber alles. Your own, as much as anyone else’s.”
It was something they had been taught since preschool. Sacrifice yourself to save the whole. Hell, they’d even play-acted it. Been taught to treasure all human life, not just those you knew and loved.
“Did I make the right call?” Clarke asked.
Raven had no answer.