Chapter Text
“I—you almost died, Lexa.” You can’t say you almost lost her, because she isn’t yours to have—she’s just a girl who lives inside you, she has grown like vines around your heart, and through your lungs, and you can’t imagine your life without the tightness in your chest. That gets tighter with every unsure glint in celadon colored eyes, every cautious smile. You want to hate how your heart thumps and skips, but it makes you feel alive, and you’ve been a feral corpse for much of the last three months. Shambling and numb.
She looks up at you, from where she glowers at slips of paper, and baskets of gifts; soured things now that the ambassadors have showed their graying colors. Her eyes are pale—almost gray, but still too green to be mistaken for such. “But I didn’t,” her brows tuck closer to her eyes, her skin still darkened slightly from where she’d hastily scrubbed her war paint from her face. “And if I had, my spirit would have chosen wisely—you don’t have to fear for your people, Klark.”
She always does this—this stupid, and stubborn girl doesn’t understand how you felt each blow like phantom pains in your chest. How even when you wanted her dead, even when rage burned through you like blood and bones and muscle; you’d still felt something debilitating and wholesome for her. This stupid warrior poet.
“That isn’t what I meant, Lexa,” you intone, “And you know it.”
Her chin dips like maybe she agrees, like maybe she knows everything you can’t say because this isn’t the time for soft somethings like that. Putting the papers down, bandage turning black from the gash across her palm, Lexa leans back.
You don’t give her the chance to comment—to smooth talk this better.
“Why do you relish the idea of dying so much?” You ask, the words fast and sharp.
Like grinding to a halt, Lexa frowns. “Relish?” A click of her tongue in a word that didn’t require it.
“Just because you aren’t afraid to die, doesn’t mean those around you want you to,” you almost feel petulant for pointing it out, but you know Titus would agree—the poor man must have lost all his hair simply from dealing with this commander and her tendency for dower dramatics.
You’re expecting a smooth comment, another fortune cookie lesson, but what you get is honesty.
You were prepared for everything—but that.
“I’m afraid, Clarke.” Lexa whispers, a trapped secret caught in wolf’s teeth, “Of dying. Of failing.” Maybe her eyes are gray—because they suddenly seem duller for the words spoken; hollow at the edges where life typically lingers, the color bleeding away until the only discernable brightness is the flicker of torchlight across her face.
“Commanders don’t live long; we’re shiny toys meant for war, and when our finish has worn away—” The pause isn’t emotional, it isn’t a hiccup, or a stammer. It’s just—quiet. An odd sort of peace you remember from solitary—of the echo in steel and cement, the artificial whir of recycled air. You never imagined that Lexa would bring to mind the black empty of space, or the loneliness found in the stars—no, she’s earth, and musk, and fire. Smoke and rain.
“We die.”
Two words—just two words, but the acceptance of them is startling. We die.
“I’m going to die, and the only comfort I have is knowing that it will mean something—that someone else will step forward, will support my people.” Lexa always stands when agitation settles in her bones—the smooth stalk of a caged predator, hands folded behind her back like she must contain her hands from the things they are so capable of. “That someone will be there for them, when I cannot.”
The artist in you longs for charcoal—so that you can somehow capture the hurricanes in her eyes, sad destructive things spiraling out at sea, picking up speed—faster, and faster. Somehow put on paper the lovingly cared for graveyard in her soul—in the curve of her shoulders, and the tilt of her chin. Proud and humble, strong and vulnerable—complex, and contradicting and—human, so damned human.
How had you missed it?
This girl—this progressive reticent wright—is so scared that tomorrow will crumble because she failed someone one too many times. That one day when all backs have turned, she will step into an arena and fall—and the cold comfort she wraps around her tender, limping heart is that it will somehow mean something. That there was some divine plan that could not have come to pass if she lived.
Standing slowly, hands loose and open at your sides, you step toward her—slow, calming—her eyes flicker to everything but your face, looking toward the candles until her pupils constrict, making her look leonine and other. You’re choking on your heartbeat when you raise trembling hands to smooth fingers along the sword edge of her jaw.
Her eyes find you; wide, and earnest, and quiet—her warm skin a comfort to the cool touch of your fingertips, so much so that you can’t stop yourself from curving your palms against her cheeks, fingers tangling into the soft short hairs just below her ears. You can feel how Lexa’s jaw clenches and jumps as she swallows, leaning ever so slightly into the warmth of your palms.
“I’m sorry,” you say in sharp focus, but the edges of your vision are blurring—the sting is distant, far away, and it builds as you meander through your thoughts. Pulling on the edges of the tapestry—no longer satisfied with the splashes of color. You want substances—images woven into the fabrics. A red string, a gold one—a celadon one.
You feel it all acutely—pit falls and fortress walls spaced equally through your heart, but you know the landscape intimately. The guilt, and shame, and anger, and fear—it races through you with such force you couldn’t imagine not wearing it just under your skin. That was why you had to leave—you couldn’t look at those you had killed to keep safe, you couldn’t watch them live, and not shatter. You had to hide these truths from them—had to hold their burden for them, because—because why?
But Lexa—she stayed. She carved out pieces of her heart—you know that now, know it so well—and speared them through, leaving them at the gates of Polis as a warning. If I’ll do this to those I cared for, what will I do to those who I don’t? You suppose Nia learned that lesson—a lecture capitulated on the tip of a spear. Lexa had watched the weak shadows who had left the mountain trembling grow—become strong again, walk with straight spines.
She lingered in the dark, listening to the whispers of betrayal, folding the concerns inward and away, until they were just another sharp edge through the chambers of her heart. Another black spot on her darkening soul.
“You’ve done nothing, Klark.” Her voice is a rumble, a burred whisper of confusion, while brows pull downward and eyes refuse to move from your own—a captured predator, tamed all the while as your fingers scratch lightly against her jaw, but there was that something lingering in the green of her eyes.
You forge on regardless.
“You’re so good at tucking away things you don’t—shouldn’t—feel,” you want to ask the oldest a commander has been, you want to ask how old she is—you want to know so many of the rock formations that live under her skin. The hard points that press into her muscles, and against her bones. “I’m sorry I forgot that.”
God, the way she looks at you—so quiet, so contemplative—her eyes skimming along your cheeks and across your lips. Like there are words there to read, stories to be told that you haven’t brought yourself to voice. But when she finds your eyes again, there is that resolve lingering in the curl of her shoulders—so much more delicate now that the armor has been removed, that her body is that of a girl, and not a warlord.
“I was selfish before—so selfish. I was young, and sad, and scared, and I didn’t know how to live with that—not once the mantle of commander became mine, not once it wasn’t just some distant possibility.” Like looking at lightening jumping through the clouds a mile away—hearing the rumble of thunder—knowing it was heading right for you, but still having those moments to breath.
“I loved Kostia; she was bright, and soft, and knew when I just needed—,” you will never know what, but the hapless lift of delicate shoulders is enough for you to understand. Nothing tawdry, nothing lewd—but for the leader of twelve clans—thirteen—they’re unmentionable things. “But I was selfish, because I was heda, and that meant I would die—that she would be left behind. That she would have broken pieces, and ache in the places I used to fit.”
The hurricanes in her eyes make landfall—fast, and loud, and absolute—like a broken window, she shatters. Nothing untoward, nothing dramatic—a single tear, silently falling down her cheek, as if she wasn’t even aware it was there. She blinks hard once—twice—and then lifts her chin slightly. Your hands haven’t moved, and you push forward until your fingers are combing through her loose hair—until you feel the tension in the nape of her neck. Pressing into the taut muscles, rubbing away the tightness.
“And then she died; and it suddenly didn’t matter that I was going to die as well, because we hadn’t died together, and even when it felt like I couldn’t breathe, and all I was, was anger, and hatred, and sadness—I had to look her killer in the eyes, and think of my people instead.” No more tears after that first one—but your own eyes are hot and wet, your fingers gripping more than massaging. You don’t know when she’d shifted closer—but hot hands have settled low on your hips, fingers curled into the fabric of your night ware.
“Had to think of those I was leaving behind,” leaving behind, the odd hiccup in those words, the stretch and rasp, as she leans forward enough to rub her nose along yours. Even riddled with the holes of sadness pocketing your heart, your lips still part slightly, expecting the press of hers—but she simply leans her foreheads against yours.
“You left me behind,”
Her nose rubs along yours again, a silent apology—and if you were shaking, and she wasn’t hushing words into the cool skin of your jaw—you’d think it adorable.
“And I ached,” so quiet, almost unspoken, “And I was sorry. And when I found out you had lived—how it had happened—it was worse, because I couldn’t even hold the burden alone. You had it too.”
The burden—this weight that sits on your shoulders like mountains and meteors—that threatens to pull you down, to make you forget yourself. But it’s easier here—easier with Lexa. With her gray-green eyes, and the sadness that lines her bones, and the fear that lives just below her skin. You can’t forgive her—not yet, maybe not ever—but you understand, and in this world of dirt, and blood, and compromise—that’s more important.
Curling fingers into the dark of her hair, the strands knot around your knuckles, and the tug gets her attention, makes her pull back half an inch, just enough you can see how dark her hooded eyes have become—jade, instead of celadon—how her throat bobs as she swallows.
“You’re mine, Lexa.” You don’t intend to say it—but it slips past with so much meaning. Her forgiveness belongs to you, her blood is yours to spill, her skin is yours to mark—her sins yours to absolve. But beyond that, you can’t forget how she had looked—on her knees, pale eyes looking up at you, face drawn, such earnest sincerity painted into the edges of her being.
The commander bow to no one—except you.
“Klark…,” your name, a breathy exhale, but you tighten your fingers a little more, tugging, and her eyes slid shut, face going slack.
“I’ve told you before your spirit needs to stay exactly where it is,” low, your breath fanning across her cheeks, “Aden seems like a nice boy, and I’m sure he’d do his best—but he isn’t you, Lexa. I need you.”