Chapter Text
“Mommy, don’t you get nervous when you see your patient’s face during surgery?”
An eight-year-old Clarke swings her legs back and forth as she sits perched on the edge of a gurney, her blonde hair and missing teeth illuminated clearly by the brightness of the clinic’s lights. Abby gently takes out a pack of gauze and a clear bottle of rubbing alcohol to begin cleaning the scrape on her daughter’s knee. Yet another injury from playing tag with Jake in the stark hallways of the Ark.
“Sweetie, I’m not sure what you mean,” Abby says, distracted as she struggles to open the sealed bottle. Clarke feels a sting as the gauze is pressed against her raw skin and winces.
“Don’t you worry about them dying? That their mommy or daddy will lose them forever?”
Abby sighs, her lips curving in the slightest of smiles, and stands up to throw away the used gauze. When she returns, she crouches in front of the little girl with the messy blonde curls and holds her hands.
“When you become a physician, when you swear to put saving someone else’s life above all else, you have to learn not to worry. Sometimes you can’t stop the sense of panic from setting in, the pang of guilt you feel that this person trusted you and you let them down. But I learned a long time ago to separate the person and the patient. It’s easier to not look at their face, and instead focus your attention on the problem in front of you. Sometimes to save a life, you have to take their humanity away for a while.”
Abby’s eyes have moved from Clarke’s to somewhere in the distance as she seems to recall a memory. Clarke reaches out a hand to pat her mom’s shoulder, her tiny fingers stroking brown hair out of her mom’s face. Abby turns back to Clarke, a soft smile on her lips, and takes her face in her hands.
“One day I hope you will become a doctor like me. Your father certainly wants you to be an engineer, but your heart is one of a healer. An engineer fixes the station, Clarke, but a healer fixes the people. You have that instinct in you. When you’re older, I’ll teach you the rest. I’ll teach you how to make the hard choices just like I do.”
Clarke nods enthusiastically, the gravity of her promise lost on her eight-year-old mind. She lets her mom pick her up and carry her toward the heavy sliding doors, her knee patched and her father waiting in the corridor.
Focus.
Clarke’s vision is clear as she tracks the trajectory of the bullet. Titus is shaking, his aim skewed by his own panic. The bullet hasn’t entered straight, it has hit at a sharp, shallow angle, tearing through the muscle of her side rather than punching through the center. It is a messy, lateral path – high risk for the spleen, but a miracle for the spine.
“Heda…” Titus’s voice is drowned out by the roaring in Clarke’s ears. Lexa begins to fall as the shock of the wound catches up to her.
“No, no!” Clarke catches her before she makes contact with the harsh wooden floor, Titus a fraction of a second behind her. “Help me get her to the bed!”
Titus lifts her up, robes splayed around the tragic scene of a teacher holding the very student he vowed to protect, and places her quickly, but gently, on the bed. “Fiya, Heda,” he whispers, the words stuttering as the weight of his mistake finally breaks him.
Clarke feels tears prickling at her eyes, a stutter in her heart, as she applies pressure to the wound. Clarke feels the resistance of the muscle. The bullet hasn't punched deep into the peritoneum. A tangential hit. It meant the difference between a funeral and a surgery.
“I need something to stop the bleeding! You'll be okay. Just lie still, okay? Lie still.” She says frantically, hands tearing at the fabric of Lexa’s shirt as black blood trickles from her open mouth. The sheer volume of blood makes the fabric slippery beneath her fingers and a cold frustration begins to set in. A single tear rolls down Lexa’s face.
Separate.
Clarke presses her hands firmly on the gunshot wound, mind racing as her physician training kicks into overdrive. She hears Lexa’s voice through the mess of her thoughts.
“Don’t be afraid,” Lexa strangles out between quickening breaths, a voice wracked with pain and sorrow and betrayal of the worst kind. Her tears come quicker.
The sound is enough to make Clarke want to curl into a ball and cover her ears. But the blood is too warm, spreading too fast beneath her fingertips, and the doctor in her – the one that was born on that inconsequential day in the clinic – forces her to blink the tears away and gather her thoughts.
Focus, Clarke.
Clarke wishes her mother was there. She would know what to do. Even more, she wishes Lexa could be there as Lexa, instead of a patient dying beneath her hands, the hands of Wanheda, Commander of Death. What good is the Commander of Death if she can’t scare death away from where it doesn’t belong? Clarke thinks bitterly to herself.
“You're gonna be fine. Just stay still,” She says to Lexa, desperately wishing for it to be true.
The lie tastes like copper in her mouth. Lexa’s breathing becomes a series of short, wet stutters, the sound of a body beginning to compensate for a catastrophic drop in blood pressure. Clarke feels a tremor in her fingers and forces it down. “She's losing too much blood. Stay with me.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Titus taking primitive medical instruments out of some sort of leather sleeve. Murphy appears to be moving around in an odd manner, presumably attempting to escape his bindings, but Clarke forces her eyes back to the Commander. She lifts her head for only a second to look at Titus. “What the hell is that? Titus, what are you doing?”
Separate.
“I will fix you. Just stay with me,” She says, her carefully crafted physician’s persona threatening to betray her. Titus advances on the body of the woman so valiantly holding on. “Oh no, get away from her!” Clarke shouts, attempting to block Titus’s movement with her own body.
“I am doing what must be done. The Spirit of the Commander must be preserved.”
“That’s an infection waiting to happen,” Clarke snaps at the man who had done the unthinkable in the name of protection. “You do this, and she dies of sepsis before the sun sets. Move.”
Titus ignores her and continues laying out those terrifying instruments, holding the promise of a quick death for Lexa. Clarke isn’t having it. She feels herself torn between applying necessary pressure and body-blocking the Flamekeeper, but Murphy ensures she doesn’t have to choose. His arms now free from their bindings allow him to swing the legs of the chair he was still tied to and connect with the back of Titus’s legs.
The Flamekeeper goes down with a grunt of surprise, his primitive tools scattering across the floorboards. Murphy leans back, his chest heaving as he finally claws the sweat-soaked gag from his mouth, spitting out the taste of cheap hemp and salt. Clarke pauses her work for a second as she sends a swift kick to Titus’s head, knocking him out, not a care in the world for if the Flamekeeper lived or died.
"Stay down, Priest," Murphy bites out, his voice strained as he struggles to balance the chair still anchored to his ankles.
Clarke doesn't thank him. She didn't have the breath to spare. Titus’s interruption has cost her three seconds of pressure, and the black blood is already pooling over the wound. The flickering torchlight is a curse, forcing her to strain her eyes against the shifting shadows as the blackness on her hands begins creeping up her forearms.
Separate.
"Murphy, get over here. I need you," Clarke orders. Her voice is a flat, clinical blade, leaving no room for his usual sarcasm. Murphy hops closer, his chair thudding against the floor in a rhythmic, chaotic beat.
Lexa’s eyes are unfocused, tracking nothing. Her skin has turned a sickening, clammy grey, the classic onset of hypovolemic shock. A faint blue tint is blooming on her lips, a stark contrast to the black blood that continues to seep from the corner of her mouth with every shallow, rattling breath.
Clarke stares at the stain of black. For a fleeting moment, she imagines that the black is only war paint – the fierce display of strength that often surrounds Lexa’s eyes in the quiet moments before a battle. Black contrasting green, like the shadows surrounding a forest in the dead of night. She finds herself wishing they were marching into a battle of strength instead of this. Strength she could handle. But they’re in a battle against time, and time is a thief that doesn't care about the Commander of the Thirteen Clans.
As Murphy reaches down to help, his eyes meet Clarke’s. The image of sarcasm and false confidence is still there, but his hands are shaking. He grabs a thin blanket off of the edge of the bedframe and begins ripping it with his teeth, using each strip of fabric to soak up blood before tossing it to the side carelessly. "You're actually doing this. You're trying to fix the Commander with rags and a guy tied to a chair."
"We need to stabilize the internal bleeding here and then get her to my mom," Clarke whispers, more to herself than him. “If we stay here, Titus’s people will 'ascend' her right into an early grave."
Suddenly, loud bangs are heard from the other side of the heavy oak doors. Clarke curses silently, realising that the guards must have heard the gunshots and are running to investigate. She’s actually surprised that it has taken this long, but she knows that time is measured differently by physicians – recorded in heartbeats, breath rates, and the dreaded ‘time of death’. In reality, only minutes have passed.
“Great.” Clarke mutters to herself, just within earshot of Murphy.
Spurred on by panic, he removes his hands from Lexa’s abdomen and leans forward, the chair creaking as if it were an extension of his own body. The moment Murphy’s weight leaves Lexa’s side, Clarke’s hands are there, her palms slick as she shoves a pile of clean rags into the wound to keep the pressure steady. He hops along on his wooden chair, dragging the discarded bloody rags, marked with the distinct black of a Nightblood, across the floor from the entrance toward the balcony, leaving a trail of black in his wake.
“Murphy, what are you doing?” she asks, her mind locked in a violent triage of the imminent physiological collapse of the woman beneath her hands versus the literal splintering of the wood as the guards batter against the door.
Thankfully, Murphy’s self preservation instincts prove helpful, as he appears to be forming a plan in his mind.
“The guards will think you took off with the commander and head to the ground floor to investigate. You stay here and I’ll play the hostage. It’s a role I’ve perfected. Hide Lexa and I’ll point them at the window and hope they’re too busy chasing you to break my jaw.”
Clarke knows the plan has many uncontrolled variables, but it appears to be the only solution. She gives nothing more than a slight nod and begins recounting the layout of the room in her head to find a suitable hiding place. Upon realising that moving Lexa is inevitable, she starts prepping for transport. A torn linen wrapped tightly around her abdomen will have to do, for now.
What if Abby is incapacitated? Will Pike let us into Arkadia? Will Lexa even survive the journey?
Clarke forces the panic down, compartmentalizing the fear into a box she didn't have time to open. One problem at a time. She logrolls Lexa with practiced caution, sliding a thick fur blanket beneath her before easing her back down to form a makeshift stretcher.
The moment Lexa’s weight hits the pelt, blackness begins to soak the thick fur. Clarke’s heart stutters as the visual hits her like a physical blow. Suddenly, she isn’t in the tower, but rather a field, surrounded by hostile Grounders. Her hands are stained a shade of red, hearing the ghost of a boy's voice whisper a final, devastating “Thanks, Princess.”
The sound of wood splintering at the door snaps the tether. The memory vanishes, replaced by the reality of the woman currently dying under her hands.
Not again, her mind snarled. Not this time.
Clarke grips the stretcher and pulls.