Work Text:
“I killed him.”
It hits her slowly, but it hits her nonetheless.
Echo sinks to the grounds, spreads her palms across the wet smelling mossy undergrowth. At least here, in the end of all things, she’s found her way home. The air is crisp, like it’s just stopped raining, and it’s verdant and green and, distantly, she wants to laugh — green is good. She wishes Monty and Harper could see this; she wishes Bellamy was here; she wishes—
Somewhere ahead, Octavia is making an ugly, guttural, shuddering sound, like she’s choking on her own tears, and Echo looks up.
Their eyes meet, and she looks nothing like the Octavia that Echo thinks she knows, the Octavia she was starting to call sister. Here she looks ill, almost feverish. She’s pulled her mouth into a grimace across her face, lips taut and baring all her teeth. It’s a silly thing to notice, but the first thing Echo thinks is: her glassy eyes are a pale slate colour. She doesn’t even look like Bellamy.
Behind her, Clarke shrinks in on herself, and looks past Octavia, to look at her. Her eyes are barely discernible for all the tears, her face scrunched up and pink. She looks ugly, like a new-born baby, pathetic and infantile and nothing like something that could kill Bellamy.
Echo gropes absentmindedly at the mossy undergrowth at her feet for something to latch onto, to ground herself with. Her fingers curl around a stone, smooth against her palm, a hard edge against her fingertips.
“You can hate me if you want to,” she croaks, her voice scraping across hoarse vocal chords, and Echo wonders, for a second, if they fought. She remembers Lovejoy, and Bellamy’s hands around his throat. She remembers the cold metal of the cages, the cold sweat after being bled — and blood must have blood. It isn’t up to Clarke to give Echo permission to mourn the dead; the warrior doesn’t mourn the dead until the war is done. “God knows I—”
Echo is on her feet in a moment, crossing the distance between her and Clarke. She swings, slams the stone into Clarke’s temple. Clarke makes a noise, high pitched, from the back of her throat, and stumbles into Echo’s waiting hand. She pushes her the ground, hits her again. There’s blood matting Clarke’s hair. It will be messy, and Echo wishes she had her sword. It would be easier that way. Bellamy would prefer it that way.
Her hands are around Clarke’s throat, her thumbs pressing down. Clarke attempts to grab at Echo’s wrists to push her off, but Echo has always been stronger than her, in every one of their altercations.
In spite of everything, Echo had vouched for the Commander of Death, and defended her from Echo's own family. In spite of the way Clarke had betrayed and brutalised everyone and every thing Echo had ever loved and cherished, right down to their own planet, Echo had remembered the way Clarke defended her ahead of the death wave of Praimfaiya hitting. Echo remembers her debts.
“Bellamy wouldn’t want this,” Clarke tries to wheeze out, her legs feebly kicking out from underneath Echo.
“You,” Echo spits, and squeezes, “have no idea what Bellamy would have wanted.”