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In between the sky and the sand, Clarke sits still. Her palms sink into the grains as she stares up at the pitch black sky. Absent of stars, the moon hangs brightly. Mockingly. She wonders, as she does every night, if Madi can see her now. Clarke closes her eyes and welcomes the blackness that greets her. It takes mere seconds for – just like every night, like every single time she closes her eyes – a pattern of freckles to replace what should be the stars.
It doesn't take long for Clarke to realize that the people she’s left with on Earth aren't her friends. In the last few weeks a part of civilization, Clarke had been so focused on saving them from the next thing, the next end of the world, that she seemed to forget that nobody here has ever particularly liked her.
As reality sets in, they try. Octavia remembers, quickly, what they all seemed to forget. She can't look at Clarke, but Clarke can’t even stare at her own reflection in the water. Echo, Raven, Emori, Murphy, the rest of his family, tiptoe around her with a begrudging tolerance that they have no choice but to give her. Miller brings him up, once, but Clarke’s too weak to respond.
Gaia is perhaps the only genuine effort, sitting with Clarke in silence beside campfire or in the early hours of the night.
On a particularly regretful day, less than a year in, Clarke corners Levitt after Octavia stormed off from their dinner.
Had roasting a hog over the fire triggered the same memory for her it did for Clarke?
“Where do those who don't transcend go?” Clarke asks. Her fingers grip his sleeve, desperate for an answer that’ll provide her any sort of relief from the agony that rips up her chest. “Where will we go?”
Levitt doesn't mistake Clarke’s sudden interest in his religion for intrigue. His eyes flicker behind her. Clarke can make out him looking for Octavia, wondering if she’ll come back, explain and apologize for running off without a word. In a stronger state, Clarke would pity him. He’s here for Octavia, and like Clarke, Octavia’s realizing – these people aren't her friends.
There are times Clarke thinks her failure sent them to hell. Raven spends the day finding something to tinker with and erupting into wails when it doesn't spark. Echo consoles her with a want to make her feel better, but her voice lacks warmth, ticks with a homegrown sense of irritation. The mother and daughter keep to themselves, quiet, watchful. The others, aside from Miller, Clarke avoids, and even then, it’s so he can make sure she doesn't off herself
The decade of bloodshed, the people they lost, those they loved killed – Clarke swallows a lump in her throat. They all regret being here with her. Choosing to stay here instead of transcending.
“Some said there’s an afterlife,” Levitt explains, “not like a heaven or hell. Like a… waiting room. But it was taboo to discuss, I don't know much about it.”
“But there’s somewhere.”
“I believe enough. For Octavia, for you.” Levitt says. “I hope you get the chance to reunite again.”
Clarke blinks. It dawns on her then, that Octavia, the rest his family, didn't choose to return to Earth for her. With a wave of relief and a sting of tears, she realizes, they’re here for Bellamy. Waiting for him.
A pit in her stomach forms. Her teeth grind, and with a curt nod, she steps away from Levitt.
Clarke’s here, on Earth, because she wasn't deemed worthy to transcend. Bellamy’s not here because she took that away from him. If he’s waiting for them, like they’re waiting for him–
Her feet carry her deep into the forest, until she can't see her hands or orient herself. Clarke’s chest heaves up and down. Her palm slaps against her throat, desperate for a gasp of air, but it comes out in a wretched sob. Her back finds a tree, and she slides down the bark and lets it cut up her spine. Hot tears burn Clarke’s cheeks. The cool chill of the air spikes up her neck, and makes her cry harder.
Octavia runs off once Indra dies. Being the last few people left on Earth didn’t grant her immunity, like it didn't grant Clarke peace. In the morning, Clarke will tell the rest of them she’s gone. Levitt will insist something happen, and they’ll all try and look for her. When they discover a bag of clothes and food is missing with her, they’ll realize.
By chance, Clarke is the one to see her go. She’s up in the middle of the night, as she always is, staring at the sky and asking for answers she’ll never get. Clarke spots something shift in the distance, and she’s foolish enough to think maybe, maybe, it’s him. She runs after it, and comes across the only alive Blake.
“Where will you go?” Clarke asks.
Octavia pauses mid-step. Crickets sing over the silence. Octavia’s back is to her, but Clarke sees her shoulders rise and fall.
“Anywhere,” Octavia glances over her shoulder, “anywhere but here.”
“You won’t find anyone else.”
“I don’t need to.” Octavia turns to face her. She pauses, considering. “Did you stay with him?”
Clarke lifts her chin. Silence rings through the air and gives space for the crickets to mock them. Octavia scoffs, then chokes, hanging her head as she begins to weep silently.
“He never would have done that to you,” Octavia cries.
I know. Clarke wants to scream. The Lexa-shaped alien said she failed humanity by shooting Cadogan, but Clarke knows it’s because of Bellamy. The reason she’s been damned to eternity with strangers, with friends of the Clarke who last begged for true peace at the dropship, is because she killed the last person who saw her for all she was. Who loved in her in spite and because of what she had become.
All of them were standing in that forest, unmoving and uncaring at the fact that Clarke had killed him, pulled the trigger that ended his life, left him there to bleed out. The fog of war. Another life taken for the price of those they cared more about, or maybe, just for more lives than just his one cost. Bile rises in Clarke’s throat.
Octavia’s wipes her tears with the back of her sleeve. Her face hardens in the pale moonlight peaking through the trees.
“You had to know,” Octavia breathes in, then out, “you had to have known.”
Clarke says nothing. She knows everything.
His glances when he thought she wasn’t looking. The stares, the touches, that lingered moments too long. The things he said, all he didn’t.
Her own heart gave into it once. Almost. Almost is a summary of the two of them. She almost got in a screaming match with him in the middle of camp. He almost ran away with her back at that bunker ravaging for supplies. She almost told him not to leave for Mount Weather. She almost stayed. He almost told her he loved her. She almost shot him. He almost kissed her minutes before leaving her on Earth. She almost let him. She almost let herself give into everything her heart was saying before it told her to save her energy for Madi.
She killed him.
Clarke doesn’t remember when it stopped mattering, or if it ever did. Something was always wrong, the time never right. Between Grounders, a war, Mount Weather, war, ALIE, Priamfaya, six years between space and Earth, war, Sanctum – Clarke closes her eyes. Remembers the warmth of his mouth on hers as he breathed the life back into her only for her to steal his weeks later.
Tears slide down Clarke’s cheeks. She doesn’t weep, no sound leaving her body, but burying deep in her stomach. Adding to the pile of regret and heartache that’s etched into her DNA.
“You’re not going to find him out there,” Clarke says. I’ve tried.
“I’m never going to find him again,” Octavia marches forward. Clarke pulls her shoulders back and prepares for impact. Instead Octavia stops inches from her. “Only in death.”
“You can’t-”
“I’ll wait it out on my own. Away from,” Octavia casts a glance towards their makeshift camp, buried behind trees, “whatever this is.” She looks at Clarke, her mouth trembling. “I’ll see him again. I know it.”
Clarke nods. She’s not certain she believes in the afterlife. Or if she wants to. To face Bellamy again would be to face that she hasn’t earned his forgiveness. Never gave herself the chance to, never gave him the chance to make the decision.
“You said you understood,” Clarke croaks.
Octavia smiles bitterly. “I do. What’s more undeserving of humanity than that?”
It’s an accident. Or maybe she’s trying to get to him sooner.
Clarke’s underwater. Her lungs fill with water and when she tries to come up to the surface she can’t seem to find it. Her vision goes black as her lungs scream. When she opens her eyes, he’s there.
Relief clears the water in her lungs. He’s hovering over her. The stars in the sky don’t sparkle like his freckles do. His mouth is formed in a tight line. His eyes are alert, narrowed in suspicion. He straightens, and Clarke sits up. Bellamy, decked in his guardsmen jacket and the blue Henley shirt her lived off of, stares down at her. His smirk from their days on the dropship welcomes her home.
I’m dead.
“Not quite,” Bellamy reads her mind. He outstretches his hand. She takes it. His palm is warm.
The worry lines etched into his face have melted away. His hair is shorter, curlier, his body leaner. He’s the Bellamy she used to despise, the one she learned to trust. As she gets to her feet, her limbs ache. She moves forward, eager to hold him and he steps back.
“I’m sorry,” Clarke blurts. Her eyes are brimming with tears. Looking at him hurts. “I’m so sorry, Bellamy, please-”
Bellamy shakes his head. “It’s a little late for that.”
Clarke draws back. “You’re not him.”
“Why?” Bellamy taunts. “Because I can’t say no to you?”
Clarke squeezes her eyes shut. She’s dreaming. The fog around Bellamy is a pure white. So bright and blinding that it peaks through Clarke’s eyelids. When she opens her eyes, Bellamy’s gone. Her chest gives out. She turns around, and there he is again. His Henley shirt is still on, but torn at the collar, his guardsmen jacket gone. Blood and scars matt his face.
“You won’t be here long,” Bellamy says.
Is she being sent to hell? She’ll never have Bellamy again, because he’s here, in the bright white while she waits to get dragged down to the darkest pits of eternity. Her fingers tremble. Why can’t she touch him? Because he told her not to or because she can’t bring herself to lift her hand?
“I’m too late,” Clarke acknowledges, “I can’t save you. I can’t bring you back.”
Bellamy crosses his arms over his chest. “You just realized that?”
“No. No, it’s just, I know. I know what I’ve done is irreversible.”
“That why you’re here?”
Clarke’s eyebrows lace together. She glances around her. It’s not her mindspace, or the test. It’s just a blank, white canvas. Her stomach lurches. Has Bellamy been here the whole time? Vanished to a space of nothingness? Is this where sent him?
“Why am I-” she looks back at him, and Bellamy’s in his Mount Weather uniform. Clarke coughs, “I don’t know why I’m here.”
A smirk slides across Bellamy’s face. It’s out of place in his Mount Weather uniform, but it’s his. Clarke’s chest expands, her heart finding a steady rhythm perhaps for the first time in months. She aches to throw her arms around him. Press her mouth against his. Her hand grows warm with the memory of his overtop, pulling that lever.
He turns his back to her and starts walking. There’s nowhere to go, but she follows like a lost puppy, trailing at his feet.
“You’ll go back to them soon,” he explains.
“I don’t want to,” Clarke confesses.
He stops and turns to face her. This time, he’s the Bellamy that nearly rescued her from Roan. His hair is disheveled and sticking up in different directions, a few curls making it through. He’s in someone’s Grounders gear. He’s slick with sweat. The side of her face he brushed a strand of hair from tingles.
Bellamy lifts his head to examine her. He’s so real. It has to be him. Or is it the alien playing tricks on her again? Taunting her before sending he back to hell on Earth.
“What do you want?” Bellamy asks.
“If I could bring you back, I would.” Clarke says.
His smirk is back, laced with a cruelty Clarke hasn’t seen since their first few days on the dropship.
“I’ve brought you back before,” he says mockingly, “didn’t help me in the long run.”
“I know you hate me,” Clarke swallows, “I hate me, too.” She inhales sharply, shaking her head, “But you, Bellamy, I’ve always-”
“Not always. Maybe not ever,” Bellamy interjects.
“That’s not true-”
“It is, Clarke. Look where we are.”
Clarke looks around again, greeted just by the pure white light. Her chest constricts, eyes sting. She knows when she looks back at Bellamy, she’s going to see a different version. She tries to guess. The Bellamy that stood in front of her in Polis and begged for her to come back with him. The Bellamy that chained her to the table in Arkadia. Bellamy the first time she aimed a gun at him.
Instead it’s Bellamy in a hazmat suit. “I should’ve used more of my brain, huh?”
It’s a joke that doesn’t land. Clarke’s heart shatters.
“I should’ve had more heart,” Clarke whispers.
“You had plenty of heart. Just not for me.”
“That’s not true, Bellamy-”
“You killed me, Clarke.” Bellamy laughs sadly. Tears fill Clarke’s eyes, and Bellamy’s shoulders deflate. “I don’t regret anything.”
Clarke pulls her shoulders back and sniffles. “Well, you were right about transcendence-”
“Not that,” Bellamy shakes his head, “I don’t regret anything I did for you. Even now, after what you did. I’d do it all over again, and I’d do it the same way.”
“I would,” Clarke protests, stepping forward. She places her hand above his heart. There’s no heartbeat. Tears slide down Clarke’s cheeks. “I would change everything.”
She would realize sooner. She’d have kissed him before the end of the world. If she had let herself feel, maybe she could have saved him, saved herself. Returned one of his lingering stares, leaned in when he looked at her lips, wouldn’t cut him off before he got the nerve to confess.
If Clarke could go back, she would have shot his leg. Bellamy laughs. Clarke jumps, a little startled, before she remembers he can read her mind.
“You haven’t changed at all, Clarke,” Bellamy says, “and that’s okay.”
Clarke can’t fathom Bellamy loving her through this. Feeling the same way after she callously took his life. She starts to weep, unable to control it, not caring to. She lowers her head to his shoulder. He doesn’t wrap his arms around her. She doesn’t feel the warmth of him. She cries harder.
His hand comes to her lower back. It slows her weeping the slightest bit. His cheek rests a top of her head. Clarke clings to him.
“Let me stay,” Clarke begs, “I don’t need to go back. I need you.”
“It’s not me you want.”
“No,” Clarke draws back, but keeps her arms around him. He stares back at her with a beard and wiser eyes. Her hand comes up, her finger dusting his cheek lightly. “I just want you.”
“You can’t stay.”
“Then I’ll come back,” Clarke steps back and takes a deep breath.
Bellamy tilts his head, pityingly. “That’s not how it works.”
Panic fills Clarke’s chest. She’s made amends with the fact she’ll never see Madi again. Fear has chased her for as long as it has, worried sick she’ll be reunited with Bellamy in the afterlife, and he not be like this. His afterlife spent avoiding her and hers, damned to the life she’s currently living, alone. There’s her mother, her father, Wells, Lexa, but not Bellamy, and it makes her nauseous and head spin.
Clarke’s fingers wrap around his jacket, pleading. “I can’t do this without you.”
“You’ve been doing fine, Clarke.”
“No, no, Bellamy, please,” Clarke cries, head shaking rapidly, clinging tighter. “I need you-”
“You’ve never needed me.”
“I did, I do!”
“It’s forgiveness you want,” Bellamy says gently, wrapping his hands gently around hers.
Clarke searches his eyes for it. Waits for him to say it. She can spend the rest of her days on Earth in this hell of waiting and wondering. If she knows when she dies, she’ll never see him again, but she has his forgiveness. His heart.
Bellamy brings Clarke’s hands down to her side. He steps back. “It’s time for you to go.”
Clarke’s holds her hands over her face. The panic has climbed in her chest and spilled over. Her chest heaves up and down. She tries to catch her breath, but it’s like the waters filling her lungs again. She coughs and coughs until all she can do is cry. She drags her hands down her face, smearing her tears against her skin.
Bellamy’s in disciple uniform. He blends in with the white of his surroundings. He’s clean shaven. His freckles have never been so prominent. Clarke can’t go back to watching the stars and not staring at them. His heart begins to bleed through his shirt, blood trailing down the corners of her mouth. Clarke goes weak, reaching for him, her hands slipping through him.
He’s a ghost, a haunted memory of everything she become since her feet touched the Earth’s soil. Her humanity, whatever was left of it, was in Bellamy. She pulled the trigger, the bullet pierced his heart and any chance of redemption for Clarke bled out with him.
“I need forgiveness,” Clarke falls to her knees. She bows her head, her body wracking with sobs.
He looks down at her. Probably for the first, only, time. Bellamy kneels. His fingers come to her chin, lifting her head up. Clarke whimpers. She can feel his breath on her face. He’s real. A sad smile paints his face.
“You can’t get it from me.”
When her eyes open, she stares up at a cloudy sky. She coughs up water, drenched from head to toe, Raven and Miller hovering over her, cheeks stained from the lake and tears.
“I saw him.”
Miller doesn’t glance her way, sending the hammer into the nail of their makeshift cabin. It’s the third time it’s fallen because of a storm. He peers at his friends a couple of feet away, out of earshot. Clarke’s been avoiding them all since they resurrected her. She’s positive she was dead, or close to, and if they hadn’t pulled her out of the water and breathed life back into her lungs, she would still be with Bellamy.
Bringing Clarke back to life never serves anyone. She doesn’t know who pressed their lips to hers while she was unconscious. All she can feel is Bellamy’s mouth.
“That why you tried to kill yourself?” Miller hums. “To see Bellamy?”
“No,” Clarke protests, but she’s not sure. “I’m saying - there’s an afterlife. When we die, we won’t transcend, but-”
Miller sighs, throwing the hammer onto the ground. “I’m tired of talking about death.”
“I’m not talking about death,” Clarke tries. “It’s not just Bellamy. It’s your Dad. Monroe, Harper, Monty-”
“Look around, Clarke,” Miller says gently. Too afraid to raise his voice and break her, drive her back into the lake, he adds, “We’ve made a life here. A life without war, without people dying for no reason. We earned this.”
Clarke didn’t.
She screws her mouth shut. Miller’s eyes have grown tired, crow’s feet ticked at the edge of them. The pricks of hair on the top of his head are freckled with grey. His cheeks are hollower, and he spends his days fishing with Jackson or going on long walks with the rest of them. He’s slowed with age, they all have, Clarke, too.
But they’re still so far from their final days. Indra was older then them by twenty or thirty years, but Clarke’s certain she was suffering terminally before she passed.
Octavia’s been gone for a few years. How long has it been? Every day feels like the same one. A timeloop that Clarke can’t get out of. Not by death, not by running away. Her own personal hell that she’s been damned to. She’s thought about going somewhere else in the middle of the night, just like Octavia. Levitt cried himself to sleep for months after she left, Gaia still speaks about her. Clarke’s sure she wouldn’t be similarly missed.
Maybe she could look for her. Spend whatever time is left with Octavia, telling her they will see him again. But it wouldn’t be for Octavia. It would be to get a glimpse of Bellamy, to make sure that she’s okay for Bellamy. For a chance of his forgiveness when Clarke gets to see him again.
“Why did you guys come back?” Clarke asks. “Why didn’t you transcend?”
Miller’s jaw ticks. “I can’t speak for the others.”
“Speak for you.”
“For you,” Miller says. “I didn’t want you to be alone.”
Clarke’s heard it before. That’s what they all said. They came back for Clarke, so she wouldn’t be alone, so they could spend the rest of their days alongside her. Giving up immortality for Clarke Griffin - it always sounded foolish, never made any sense.
The flicker in Miller’s eye tells the truth. Maybe at the time, that was the reason. Or part of it.
“You did it for a chance,” Clarke swallows, “to see them again.”
Miller lifts his chin. She used to be so perceptive. Age hasn’t dwindled her senses, perhaps sorrow has. Where is her belief? What does she believe in? If they hadn’t come back, if she had been banished to Earth by her lonesome, would she have already been gone? Would she already be with him again?
Would it matter?
“Maybe,” Miller nods slowly, “or maybe we just wanted to live.”
Clarke’s hands work before her mind does. She shoves him backwards. Miller stumbles, tripping over a log. He regains his balance, which brings Clarke to the brink of tears.
“Live for what?” Clarke sneers. “For what? Humanity will die with us. We’ll see everyone we hurt, everyone we murdered, when we die.”
“Like Bellamy?” Miller growls.
“Yeah. Yeah, like Bellamy.”
They draw the attention of the others. Through the air in Clarke’s ears, there’s muffled footsteps of them moving closer. Raven, Jackson, Echo, whoever, she doesn’t care. They should all hear this. They’re all guilty.
“You know he would have chosen the same as us,” Miller points a finger at her. “That’s why you’re pissed. Not because we’re here, but because he isn’t.”
“You suddenly care about Bellamy?” Clarke seethes. A hand comes up to her shoulder, Niylah’s, but she smacks her hand away. She faces the group of them, who have gathered around like spectators. “Do any of you?”
Echo speaks first, like nails dragging down a chalkboard, “We gave you grace, Clarke. But that can only last for so long.”
Grace has lasted years. Only because Clarke’s stayed silent, tucked away, isolated. All of them have moved forward. Their laughter reaches Clarke’s ears, but she’s never close enough to be in on it. Their smiles are constant, wide-mouthed and toothy. She sees their kisses in the dark and in the daylight, attends their made-up ceremonies and lets them play pretend with the fake life they’ve all been given. If this is their peace, fine. Let them have it.
The silence that proceeds them is laced with pity. Poor Clarke, crazy Clarke. The Clarke who saved them all, once, twice, a million times over. Who murdered countless people, civilizations, for her people. With Bellamy by her side, with only Bellamy by her side. Clarke, who closes her eyes and only sees Bellamy, despite the screaming, pleading voices of everyone she’s killed echoing in her head. Poor Clarke, who hasn’t moved forward, past the carnage that they once were all used to.
“We’ve all done horrible, horrible things, Clarke,” Levitt tries. Her gaze snaps to his with a glare, and while he falters, he ultimately continues, “but we’re all the Earth has left. All we can do is forgive, for each other.”
“Forgive?” Clarke breathes.
“Gaia and I, we lead open discussions about our regrets, our sins, with the others,” Levitt gestures to Gaia. Gaia has the sense to stay quiet, lips firm, eyes telling Levitt to shut the fuck up. “It’s helpful. To confess, to make amends how we can. From what Octavia told me, Bellamy would have wanted-”
Clarke’s fist collides with Levitt’s face. He falls to the ground, but Clarke doesn’t stop. She wails on him, sending her fists down and barely feeling the blows. Someone is dragging her off, but she’s screaming, sobbing, can barely make out the blood on Levitt’s face much less her knuckles.
“You didn’t even know him!” Clarke screams. Murphy holds her hands behind her back, Miller helps. She bursts out of their grip, addressing the crowd in a frenzy. “You all forgive me because it’s easier than facing the fact that you sat by and did nothing. I killed your friend, your boyfriend, a brother, and you all did nothing!”
She wishes they killed her. One of them drew a sword, a gun, or even their fist, and punished her for taking Bellamy from them. But Bellamy was already gone, and without him, Clarke was the only one able to save them. The only one with the track record to do so. Poor Bellamy, crazy Bellamy, so wrapped up in transcendence that for once, he put his feelings for Clarke aside to stand on a value of his own.
Jackson and Emori hurry to Levitt’s side, helping him up. Clarke’s chest heaves up and down. Through the blood streaking down his face, matting his lighter features, he almost looks like-
“We can’t bring Bellamy back-” Raven.
“You don’t want him back,” Clarke spits.
“He’s been dead for years, Clarke,” Niylah says softly, “decades.”
Clarke spirals around them. They circle her like prey. Killing her with words that assuage their guilt and amplify hers. Spending decades with them, fuck, Clarke hasn’t noticed the signs of their aging. All of their greys, their wrinkles, pouches of fat or hollows of skin.
“That life we had, the people we were,” Gaia tries to approach, but one swift look from Clarke and she stays put, “those people are as dead as he is.”
Clarke’s still alive. Heart is still beating. Her hair may be longer, greyer, she may be older, but she’s the same Clarke that landed on the ground in that dropship. That murdered hundreds of people she can’t remember the faces of. Who raised Madi and watched her transcend. Who killed Bellamy.
All of them, the people they were before Bellamy died, are buried deep inside. Clarke’s tried her best to bury that part of herself, too. But unlike them, who have each other, she has no one. The only person she’s ever had, and somehow still does, living inside her, is Bellamy.
That night, Clarke leaves. Just like Octavia, in the middle of the night and without a word, except for the ones she left them with hours before. She doesn’t pack anything, no clothes, no rations. Maybe starvation will get her, or an animal. Or maybe, she’ll survive, like she always seems to. Whether she wants to, or not.
Age is too kind to Clarke. She finds food, fabric, fires. She keeps moving and makes life where she goes. This is how she was supposed to spend her days, and she knows now, the former was her punishment. Decades with people who were never her friends, who moved forward while she stayed still, forgetting Bellamy while she couldn’t. Octavia had the sense to leave earlier, Clarke wasted years thinking if she stayed with people who knew him, loved him better than she did, that it would bring her closer to him.
Or maybe earn his forgiveness.
“Day four thousand, two hundred and sixty two,” Clarke says to the sky. The stars twinkle in greeting. “I’m slower than I used to be. I can’t walk for days on end anymore.”
She only started counting once she left camp. It reminded her of those six years on Earth, just her and Madi. Clarke talking into the radio and hoping to send signals to the sky. To Bellamy. She thanks the isolation, but she knows the real reason why she’s found sanity. She’s brought back her friend. He’s in the sky, in the stars, and she can talk to him whenever she wants.
“I know I’ve got a while to go,” Clarke swallows thickly. Dread fills her chest. “I don’t know what you’ll say when I get there. If I’ve repented, if your forgiveness is earned. But I don’t care anymore. I need to see you again.”
The stars stare back at her, asking, what are you waiting for? You want to see him so bad, do it now. End your suffering. Your isolation. Go see him.
“I can’t make it up to you like this,” Clarke whispers, shaking her head. “I don’t know how.”
When she dies, her afterlife needs to intertwine with his. She needs him, always has, and yet the image of her pulling that trigger, the blood draining from his heart, haunts her.
A shudder runs up her spine. Clarke inhales. She holds the clog in her throat.
“I need you,” Clarke swallows, “if you don’t forgive me, that’s okay. I’ll spend my entire afterlife making it up to you.”
No answer. A cold chill whisks through her thinning hair.
On day eight thousand eight hundred and two of striking out on her own, Clarke goes back to the camp. She’s not sick of being lonely, has grown too comfortable in it. But she thinks her day is coming. Her hunger cues have faded, her skin so translucent she can make out the paths her veins make. And some part of it, deranged and undeserving, truly doesn’t want to die alone.
She only finds Echo, Miller and Jackson. They greet her with hugs, and tears, and she gives them the same back. The rest of them have passed. A storm, a sickness, an infection. Their most recent loss being Raven to the latter.
“I get it now,” Miller says as they sit by a fire, “now that it’s so much closer.”
Clarke blinks.
“The afterlife,” Miller prompts, “why you were so obsessed with it. I don’t know how much longer we’ve got.”
“Don’t say that,” Jackson hushes, “we’re in good health.”
“For all we know,” Echo murmurs.
Clarke glances at her. Raven’s death has been hard on her. Echo fiddles with her fingers, a smoulder Clarke hasn’t seen since their original days on Earth overtaking her features.
Clarke’s certain she doesn’t have as long as they do. On her travels here, she started coughing. She’s has a permanent cough for years, but this one followed with blood. Similarly to Indra.
“I don’t know how much longer we have,” Miller tries again. He makes eye contact with Clarke with a teary smile, “but I’m scared.”
She holds her breath. “Of what?”
“Of seeing their faces. Of them knowing I got to grow old and they didn’t.”
Understanding isn’t what Miller needs, or what he wants. Clarke reaches out and holds his hand. Their wrinkled skin join like crumpled up pieces of paper. She smiles sadly as tears slide down Miller’s cheeks. He’s cold, shaky. If Jackson knows Miller is sick, he doesn’t act like it. The look in Miller’s eye tells her everything.
It happens nights later. Jackson howls to the moon and Echo weeps. Clarke’s holding Miller’s hand as he passes, when he whispers.
“You should tell him,” Miller croaks, “before it’s your turn.”
Clarke’s eyebrows lace together. “What do you mean-”
“Don’t die without saying it,” Miller whispers, more urgently, “don’t live without saying it.”
She can’t ask what he means again because Jackson’s at his side. Clarke watches alongside Echo. Jackson bows his forehead to Miller’s and cries into his mouth. Miller’s lips are moving, saying things to Jackson that mean nothing to Clarke. Only when he tells Jackson he loves him, that his life has been worth getting to love him, does it click for Clarke.
Clarke sequesters herself to the lake that night. She goes to the same place she spent the first few decades staring up at the stars. It’s an odd familiarity. A sickening feeling to know the short time she spent with Bellamy meant more than the decades she lived without him.
“Bellamy,” Clarke says, shaking. Her vision isn’t what it used to be. The stars have grown fuzzy, and they’re less like his freckles and more like old-age moles.
She closes her eyes and pictures him. Not as he was, not as she last saw him. She feels Bellamy beside her. His freckles are prominent but patterned with moles, his eyes softer with wrinkles at the side. The hair he has left still curled, slick with patterns of grey and black. A tear escapes and slides down her cheek.
“I love you, Bellamy. I love you.”
Echo and Jackson are with Clarke when she passes. They hold her hand. It’s been just over a year since Miller’s death, and at one point, Clarke worried she’d be the last of the human race. Not because she’s not used to being alone, but because she thinks it’s another thing she doesn’t deserve.
It happens quietly. Her breath goes shallow. Her heart rate slows. Her vision fades to black.
When Clarke opens her eyes, the bright white is back. Her back is flat on a surface she can’t see. She sits up, looks down at her hands. Her wrinkles have faded, her hands as smooth as untouched as when she was living on the Ark. She brings her fingertips up to her hair, thicker and blonder, as wavy as it was when she was a teenager.
A hand, darker, knuckles scattered with hair, reaches out to her.
“About time,” Bellamy smirks.
Clarke takes his hand. He raises her to her feet. She stares at him, at the freckles she’s imagined in the stars for decades. She reaches out and dusts her fingers across his cheek. His smirk drops into a shaky smile, and he leans into her touch.
“If I could do it all over again,” Clarke whispers, “I’d do it all the same. With our people, with our friends. With everything. Except with you.”
Bellamy leans his forehead against hers. She places her hand over his chest. The steady beating of his heart makes Clarke burst into tears. Bellamy’s hands wrap around her waist.
“Immortality, the afterlife, means nothing if it’s without you,” Clarke cries. “I love you.”
He’s waited her entire lifetime for it. Clarke peers at him through teary eyes, feels his hands all over her body. Bellamy’s hand finds her chin, like it did the last time. He lifts her head, this time, to bring her lips to his. She melts into his embrace, his mouth, him.
Bellamy’s hand comes down to her cheek. “I wish we could stay here.”
Panic fills Clarke’s chest. “No, wait. Please, I don’t want to leave you again.”
“That’s not what this is,” Bellamy says, taking her hands in his. “I was waiting for you, but I can go now.”
“Go where? Bellamy, please-”
Tears fill Bellamy’s eyes. He presses his mouth to hers. Clarke collapses against his torso. He holds her up by her waist.
“You’ll find me again,” Bellamy says between kisses, “we’ll do it right this time.”
Clarke holds onto him for dear life, the life they never had. The life she stole from him. How stupid is she to think she would get to have him like this, in an afterlife that wasn’t constructed for someone like her. She keeps her mouth on his until she loses feeling in her body, until all she can feel is his lips, and then, nothing.
Clarke’s eyelids flutter open. Chatter fills her ears. Her vision is fuzzy, growing into focus. Metal walls. A red strap buckled around her chest. Wells, beside her, trying to talk to her. Pure white fills her mind, brings her comfort. The white fills with her cell up on the Ark, her mother’s hands on her forearms, telling her she’s going to the ground.
“Your crimes have made you expendable.”
The word makes Clarke nauseous. As the dropship breaks through the atmosphere and collides onto the ground, Clarke tries to make sense of her surroundings. The anger she feels towards Wells is familiar, seeded and growing. Her fear is palpable, surrounded by criminals she doesn’t know and who probably despise her for her status on the Ark. An unknown sense of dread for a possible radiation-soaked Earth.
She has to find - supplies? Food? Something, someone, else?
Clarke’s clamouring down the latter to the bottom floor of the dropship. A guard is at the front of a packed crowd of delinquents, hollering and full of gusto for their newfound life. The guard’s hand is raised to the lever.
“Stop!” Clarke calls.
The guard glances over his shoulder. Their eyes meet. Clarke knows him, is sure she’s seen him around the Ark. Maybe in a guards uniform, maybe passing each other in the corridor. But the feeling in her gut, the sense of familiarity, the flood of trust - it has to be misplaced. It doesn’t belong here.
Clarke pushes her way through the crowd. She gets to the front, face-to-face with the guard. He has a spatter of freckles across his face, kind of like the constellations she used to read about.
“The air could be toxic,” Clarke says, more breathless than she intended.
He lifts his chin. Clarke recognizes the flicker of something in his eye. Something she can’t put her finger on, but something she knows.
“The air’s toxic, we’re all dead anyway.”