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only bad people live to see their likeness set in stone (what does that make me?)
.
promise i can stay good / i’m little but i’m coming for crown / i’m little but i’m coming for the title held by everyone who’s up / all work & no play never made me lose it / all business all day keeps me up a level / all work & no play / lonely on that new shit
—lorde, ‘still sane’
//
On your fifth birthday they take you away from your parents. You, when you were Lexa, just Lexa, from a small village on the edge of the sea, all rocks and starfish you love to find in the tide pools. You liked the rhythm of the water; you liked to read near them; you liked to not speak.
They take you to the capital after your parents say calm goodbyes. You don’t understand what’s going on, but they don’t cry, and you think maybe this is like a trip you take with your father sometimes when he goes to trade lumber for food in the village one over. But the capital is far, and you fall asleep many times on a horse. A woman with dark skin and rough hands and kind eyes and a newly healed scar under her eye carries you on her horse, makes sure you don’t fall off.
“I am Indra,” she says—once in your language and once in one you’ve never heard before.
“Lexa,” you say, and try to imitate the sounds of something you don’t understand: “I am Lexa.”
She smiles gently and says, “Heda. You are Heda.”
It doesn’t make sense, but the night is cold and in the morning the capital is glimmering in front of you.
“We’re home, Heda,” Indra says, and you are still soft, you skull has just barely fused, and everything is gold and warm, so you nod and you believe her.
//
You are very tired that day, but you take a bath in a huge, marble pool, with the warmest water you’ve ever felt. They scrub the dirt off of you until your skin feels raw. They cut off inches of tangled curls from the bottom of your hair, braid some of what’s left of it to form a crown around your head. They dress you in soft clothes and boots, put a red sash across one shoulder. None of this has ever happened to you before, and they tell you not to be afraid.
You are in wonder—you are afraid and excited and you know some stories of queens and you think maybe that’s what you are.
Then Indra leads you by the hand to a big platform and whispers into you ear that you should wave.
You do, and a huge crowd of people collected below cheers.
You don’t like the noise; it makes your chest tight.
//
You feel lonely for a little while, even though there are always so many people nearby. You have people to help you get dressed, people to teach you about maps and the history of your people, the way the land is all around you. You start to learn English as well as the dialects of the other nations on earth—thirteen new sets of words to practice.
You learn ocean in all of them first.
//
When you have been there for seven months, they tell you, and it is autumn, a very large and very nice man named Etro stands in front of you in a big dirt circle near where you live and starts teaching you to fight. You hate it, at first, the idea of hurting someone just because you can.
People have told you that you’re the commander—Heda, Heda, Heda; you are not Lexa any longer—but you aren’t sure what that means, not yet, at least.
On your sixth birthday you begin to understand when you see an army ride into Polis. There are wounded with arms and legs ripped off; they smell like metal and dirt.
“This will be yours one day,” Etro explains as you sit on his shoulders so you can see them better over the crowd. “Heda, these are your people. You must protect them, because they are yours.”
//
What you realize on your eighth birthday, after you have done nothing but excel at everything everyone has taught you: you are theirs.
//
You’re nine when you’re training with some older children—sparring—and you trip accidentally and land hard. Your wrist cracks in half hard, and you hear the sound before you feel pain burst to your core. It hurts—you’re a child; you’ve fallen plenty of times before, but this is different—and they immediately take you to one of your healers, Sine. Even she winces when she examines it. It’s bad, you’re pretty sure, but she doesn’t say anything after that, just smooths down your hair in its simple braid once and then tells you that you’re going to feel some pain but after that your arm will feel much better.
You haven’t cried yet—you press your eyes shut and tell yourself in English, because it still seems the most foreign to you: Commander, Commander, you are the Commander. You want to scream and she quietly reminds you to breathe while she drains blood from around the uneven lump of your bones and then tugs. You don’t do either of those, though, just sit still and silent as she wraps a cast over your already-bruising skin. She seems like she’s a little bit in awe, and you feel sick to your stomach but your chest feels warm.
She situates your arm in a sling. “You are very brave, Heda,” she says.
You only nod: in front of your people, you cannot afford to be anything else.
//
You meet Costia that night, only hours later. You’re in your quarters and it’s late; you’re given time to yourself every night for a small while, and only now do you allow yourself to cry. Your arm hurts and you’re starting to feel very tired, so you flop down on your back onto your bed.
You’ve already bathed and in loose pajamas—someone had had to help you tonight, which you didn’t like—and you’re just going over different languages lazily in your head to try to take your mind off of how much pain you’re in when your tent flap rustles.
You’re expecting one of the women who helps you or maybe even Indra or Gustus, who are back from a battle and sometimes come to tell you about them if they can, but instead you’re surprised when a girl not much older than you walks in. She has the prettiest, deepest skin you’ve ever seen, and her eyes are dark and wide and clear. You don’t know why, but you remember the word beautiful in English.
You sniffle and get to your feet. She’s carrying a tray with what looks like tea on it and she looks nervous, you realize, so you step forward and say, “You can put it on the table here.”
She nods and puts the tray down, shaking a little, and then bows. “It is an honor to meet you, Heda.”
Your heart sinks a little, because you’re a child and you don’t really have any friends. “Can you—” you start to say, but then remember that you are the commander, and you can request essentially anything: “Address me as Lexa,” you command firmly, softly.
The girl relaxes a little bit. “Lexa,” she says, “I’m Costia.”
You nod once, in a way you’ve already learned makes people listen to you. You glance toward the tray.
“I’m Sina’s daughter,” she says, “and the warriors have come in from battle, so my mother and the other healers are tending to the wounded.”
Her words start to come quicker, like she’s trying to get it all out at once before you can stop her. It makes you want to smile, and your arm hurts a little less.
“There is medicine to help you sleep in the tea, so they told me to bring it to you.”
You take a look at the tea and then back at her, and you walk toward the table. “Thank you, Costia.”
She smiles. “Can I pour it for you, or—you’re the commander, of course you can pour your own tea, but I just—you broke your arm and both of mine are fine, and—”
You laugh, and the sound kind of surprises you, because you’ve not laughed in a long time. “You can pour it, thank you.”
She nods and hands you the warm cup of tea a few moments later.
You walk over to a couch and sit, then tuck your legs under yourself and take a sip of the tea; it’s sweet and soothing.
“You may sit if you want,” you say in English, just to see if she knows it.
She hesitates for a moment and you wonder if you’ve done something wrong, if you are too hard already, but then she nods and almost skips over to you, hops onto the couch. “My English is not as good as yours, Lexa.”
You shrug. “Do you like it?”
She frowns. “I’m learning it because my father is a warrior, so I—” she gets stuck on a word, and you wait—“might be one too, one day. But I think I would want to be a healer.”
You just watch her.
She sits forward and her eyes grow wide, and she says in rapid Trigedasleng, “Not that being a warrior isn’t amazing—I mean, you’re going to be the best warrior of them all.”
You smile gently and lift your arm in its sling a little. “Warriors would not exist without those to heal us.”
She looks down at her hands with a small smile and suddenly you feel very tired. “Costia,” you say, switching back to English, which makes her smile grow, because you think she’s smart, “you may take this.” You hand her the cup and she stands and places it back on the tray quickly while you get up from the couch and walk over to your bed.
“You should retire to your own quarters,” you say.
“Yes, Heda—Lexa. Yes, Lexa.”
You smile into one of your firs. It feels good to hear your name again. “I would like to see you again sometime, Costia.”
She’s quiet for a few moments before she says, “It was an honor to meet you.”
You’re barely able to keep your eyes open, and you know you’re supposed to keep your voice even and clear and certain at all times, but when you say, “You too, Costia,” you sound breathy and sleepy and soft and young.
//
There are advantages, certainly, to having the position of power that you do, because you request Costia to assist you with things in the evenings. No one objects, and it’s easy to be around her. She’s taller than you, a few months older. You help her with her English and she’s very, very smart. After a few weeks, one night when it’s very cold and it’s gotten late, she climbs in bed with you and you fall asleep after talking about the stars; you know how to navigate them; she knows their inherent shimmer better than anyone you know.
//
“Do you miss your parents?” she asks one day while you’re in the healer’s tent to get a little gash on your forehead bandaged and she’s there after school.
You shrug, and her mother pushes your shoulder down with a little smile and tells you quietly to stay still.
“I don’t remember them very well,” you say. “I was just five when I came here.”
Costia nods. “Well, there are a lot of people here who care for you.”
It sounds a little sad, like she can tell that you’re lying a little bit: you do miss your parents, even if you never really got to know them. “Yeah,” you say quietly.
She hops off the stool she’s on and sits next to you on the cot while her mother finishes cleaning blood off your forehead.
“There are, Lexa,” she says.
Her mom looks at the two of you with her eyebrows raised but when you take Costia’s hand and lace your fingers together, she just smiles gently and pats your shoulder.
“All better,” she says in Trigedasleng.
Costia grins and her mom doesn’t try to stop her when you lead her out of the tent by the hand.
//
Costia frequently brings home small, tragic birds that die a few hours later, but you help her bury them anyway, in the woods on the outskirts of the city. You sneak out sometimes at night and go the their little graves that are marked only with flowers, lie down near them, and talk about the stars; talk about how being commander is sometimes very scary; talk about how you’re not sure if you remember your past lives in your dreams or if you dream them only to make the terror of war easier on yourself. She always listens. She always combs her hands through your hair, which is always tangled. She’s gentle, always, and she braids these intricate little things, weaves flowers between the knots.
Her fingers are thin and lovely and her palms are so soft compared to how rough your callouses are, and once you ask, very quietly, if she wishes she could’ve saved the birds.
She’s still for a few minutes, just resting her hand in yours. “Yes,” she says, in clear, unaccented English, “but mostly I know that I can’t, so I just want to give them as peaceful a death as I can, and good place to rest afterward.”
You nod and feel tears press against your cheeks. Your chest shakes with silent sobs, and she only squeezes your hand and lets you cry.
“You are so strong,” she whispers after a while.
You sniffle.
“I wish, sometimes, that I didn’t have to be.”
“I know, Lexa,” she says. “I know.”
//
You grow older.
You are always thin, even when your trainers try to get you to put on weight and muscle, but you stay lean and light. You are strong and precise and you are built for this, despite your lack of physicality: you have to be. There is no other choice.
Once you start swordsmanship with real, actual swords, you are consistently injured, little wounds here and there. Costia is skilled enough at eleven that her mother watches over her while she bandages you. Sometimes, afterward, she comes to your tent and you have quiet dinner, and she traces the little, shiny scars with her gentle fingers, the inside of her hands so much smoother than yours.
No one objects to you two—whatever you are, whatever you are becoming—because Costia is respectful and gentle and nothing close to a threat to anything or anyone, least of all yourself; you are a warrior, but you are also a leader, and there is something in you that wants to believe that Costia’s goodness is just as important as every single one of the ways you now know to kill someone.
Your scars heal every time, after all.
//
When you’re twelve a girl named Anya—a few years older and already with five kill scars—comes to Polis and you find out that you are to be her second until you get called to be commander officially.
This is what you’ve been training your entire life so far, and when you meet Anya—who is tall and strong and wearing warpaint, her clothes ripped and rough—you force yourself to stand up straight and keep your voice strong and even, to not mess with your hair or the thread fraying on the edge of your tunic.
She bows briefly in front of you, says, “Heda,” gruffly, and you breathe an inaudible sigh of relief: your time is coming, and this is no longer just growing up.
//
The first time you actually go out on patrol with Anya, it’s autumn, and you have been raised for this, you remind yourself, as you put on your armor, already the commander’s sash on your shoulder. You have the best horse, and apparently Anya is already one of best warriors, so you take a few deep breaths and try to stay calm, to stay centered, to stay focused.
You don’t actually say anything aloud to Costia about how nervous you are, but before you leave, she helps you sweep dark warpaint around your eyes. “You look very tough, Commander Lexa,” she says, and pokes your side, and then kisses your cheek.
You blush and smile and she buckles your breastplate with a small bow. You make a very small, silent promise to come back for her.
//
Anya is a brilliant warrior, as it turns out, and she’s a great person to learn from. She’s tough and she tolerates nothing more than order from those under her command, and she runs everything so smoothly there would be no reason to do anything but follow her instructions.
She’s also patient with you, because political strategy and spatial theory of battle is only so helpful compared to the real thing. Once, on a random sweep near the southern perimeter of Polish, you come across a small group of bandits. They’re underarmed and disorganized and look out of place without horses; they’re from the Ice Nation, you figure out quickly, because of their blue tattoos. Anya gives quick, clipped orders and you have all of them captured with no casualties on either side in less than five minutes.
When they see you—commander sash and all—the blood drains from their faces.
You ask Anya, very quietly, while some other warriors are getting a log and tying the bandits’ hands along it, “Am I supposed to kill them?”
Anya smiles a little in a way that you think is probably amused, and you feel embarrassed. “No, Heda,” she says. “Jus drein jus daun. Nothing more, remember?”
You nod. “Jus drein jus daun.”
She pats your shoulder and you head back to the city. You make sure personally that the bandits are imprisoned without any issues, and you head back to your tent with Anya and meet with some political advisors to try to figure out why the Ice Nation would want to send bandits to Polis, what you should do about it, if you should worry.
They tell you that you shouldn’t, and you trust them, so you don’t.
//
A few days before your thirteenth birthday, as per tradition, you get your first tattoo. As commander, you don’t have choice over what it is or where you get it: according to what everyone tells you, you have had four past lives, so you have four points meeting on your upper arm, with small lines weaving throughout, the lives connected on the back of your arm. You approve the design when the artist shows you, because you know you can’t not approve it, really, but you’re mostly just excited. Tattoos are an honor, and usually everyone has to wait until fifteen, but—you’re Heda, you are not like everyone else.
It takes a few hours, and the skin on your arm bleeds. It hurts, but by this point you’ve learned to sink into pain, to let it overtake you for a moment and then to focus completely inside of it.
Costia sits with you, though, and she plays with your left hand and talks about what you want to be served at your honorary feast. She laughs when you say, very seriously, “Bears,” and she presses a kiss in the middle of your palm.
When the artist is done, you look at your arm before she puts a bandage over it. Your arm is still bleeding a little bit, but it doesn’t hurt too much anymore.
“Thank you,” you say, and then nod as a dismissal after the artist gathers her belongings and leaves your tent. You look to your arm again, and your stomach inexplicably swoops down, and you feel your lower lip tremble.
“Lexa,” Costia says, “what’s wrong?”
You shake your head. “Nothing,” you say, then take a deep breath and lift your head. “We do what we must.”
Costia smiles sadly and kisses the top of your shoulder. “I think it looks great,” she says. “Now, let’s go pick out what you’re going to wear.”
You follow her with a roll of your eyes, but you can’t stop from smiling anyway.
//
There are more and more Ice Nation bandits, but they’re not really a threat. They’re good practice for you, and Anya makes sure you understand the difference between the necessity of taking a life rather than the overwhelming urge to kill.
She explains a lot of things after skirmishes, too, while you’re training. You’re still young and Anya is tall and strong and she can beat you at hand to hand combat pretty consistently, but you’re better with a sword, probably because you’d had years of training.
One day you both kind of tumble and she slices open your shoulder and you catch her knee, and neither are bad but they both require stitches.
Costia is in the tent when you walk in, a bloody hand pressed to the wound, and Anya follows. Costia’s eyes are big for a moment and she tells you both to sit down. Another healer comes to take care of Anya because it’s sort of obvious Costia is taking care of you.
She takes your hand off of your shoulder and then dabs some disinfectant along the cut. You wince a little and she says, “I’m sorry,” very quietly in English, and then she runs a hand through your hair and along your cheek.
You don’t really think anything of it, and Costia doesn’t apologize again as she gives you seventeen stitches and then bandages your shoulder. Anya’s been done for a while, but she’s waiting for you by the door. Costia walks you out and says, “I’ll see you tonight?”
You nod; it’s your normal routine, at this point, to spend most nights together, and you always sleep better when you’re in her arms.
//
You’re cleaning your armor afterward with Anya when she says, “So, Costia, huh?”
You stop and look up at her. “What?”
“You like her,” Anya says.
“I love her,” you say, because you do—she is the only person in the world you love; you’re sure.
Anya smiles gently. “Do you love her like you might think of kissing her?”
Your brows knit together. You think about it a lot, what it would feel like to press your lips to Costia’s: it would undoubtedly be soft and lovely, you think.
“Yeah,” you say hesitantly; you’re not sure if you’re allowed to want this as commander.
Anya grins. “Well, she seems to love you back, I’d say.”
You breathe a sigh of relief. “Am I—I’m allowed to love someone?”
Anya looks sad for a moment, but then she sighs. “Of course, Heda. Feeling for your people is very important.”
“Good,” you say, and Anya nudges you with her elbow and you laugh.
//
Two nights later, you walk hand in hand with Costia and lie down beneath the stars. You’re both quiet and it’s the simplest, most beautiful thing you’ve ever done when you turn your head and press your mouth to hers.
Something in the very middle of your body reaches out, and she pulls you closer, and you don’t ever want to breathe again.
You have been raised to be accepting of death, and you think this might kill you—but what a way to go.
//
There’s a skirmish when you’re fourteen and your horse gets spooked and falls over on top of you. You don’t know anything until you wake up to the jostling of Anya’s horse. She’s holding you in front of her with one strong arm, and you’re making your way toward this sparkling city through weary eyes. You feel something running from your nose but you can’t bring yourself to care, or to really try to stay awake, because it’s dusk and Anya is safe.
It feels much like the same time you first came to Polish, with Indra holding you upright, and you dimly think that you do very much trust these women with your life, and that you are lucky to do so.
//
You wake up later in the healer’s tent. One of your eyes is swollen shut and your head aches and your mouth is dry, and when you try to sit up a little bit, you groan and lie back down completely—you’ve never been in that much pain before.
And then Costia’s face is hovering over you and she’s brushing aside some of your hair gently and kissing your forehead.
“Hey,” she says in Trigedasleng, and it’s strangely comforting to speak the hard, soft language you first learned with her.
“Hey,” you fight out, although your throat is tight. Costia offers you some water, puts a cup to your lips and gently helps you raise your head a little bit with her hand. You take a few sips and then lie back down, and she goes and gets you another pillow and helps you prop up a little better.
“So,” she says softly, and you smile a little, because you don’t even have to ask, “you remember falling?”
You try to nod but that just makes your face hurt, and she runs a careful hand along your cheek before continuing.
“You hit your head and broke some ribs and your leg.”
You fight through some spots in your vision to sit up a little and look at the splint on your leg, the purple bruise that’s bloomed over your thigh.
“You’ve only been asleep for around seven hours.”
You sigh and lie back down, shut your eyes because they tired.
But then Costia presses the gentlest kiss to your mouth. “Everyone was very concerned, but we informed them that our commander was going to be just fine.”
“Good,” you say, your voice rough and breathy.
She kisses you again and she says, “I was so worried when Anya brought you in.”
“Your commander is going to be just fine,” you say.
Costia sneers playfully. “Mockery is not the product of a strong mind, Lexa.”
You sigh and squeeze her hand. “Can you stay with me?”
“Lexa,” she says, “I wouldn’t go anywhere else.
//
You get another tattoo three days before you turn fifteen, as is per tradition. You get to pick this one, though, and you think about it for a while before you decide on a simple design of two interwoven, think lines that cross over and again over your spine.
It aches for days afterward, but when you are fifteen years and eight days old, Costia stands in front of you, eyes wide and hands calm. You take off each other’s clothes, and she walks behind you and kisses the tip of it, then runs her fingers down the rest. She understands; she has always understood.
It’s the best thing you have ever felt, to be with her in the ways you are that night, and the night after that, and the night after that.
//
You kill someone—a warrior from the Ice Nation, who is sending more and more people—when you’re almost sixteen. It was a necessary act, you know, and you feel nothing in that moment, because you are in the heat of a battle and there is no time for remorse.
Afterward, you give him a quick blessing in your language and shut his eyes. You have won again, and Anya glances questioningly in your direction. You nod once, and she gets on her horse without another word.
When you get back to the city, you go back to your tent and you are steeped in this inevitable tradition. Anya’s silent and she waits for you for a few minutes to take your shirt off and gesture toward the fire in the corner; it’s winter and cold.
Anya finds the tiny branding iron—the size of half a finger print—and holds it in the flames until it’s the same hue of carmine and orange.
“Ready?” she asks.
“Yes.”
She presses it firmly to the skin just between your breasts, and you clench your fists: it hurts; you’ve never been burnt before, and it’s so small but you feel it everywhere.
She pulls back the iron after a few seconds and hands you a small tube of salve.
“We can debrief tomorrow,” she says. “It’s late.”
You nod. She salutes, and you feel kind of confused as to what to do with yourself—you have been raised, trained, beaten into being able to take lives, and now you have, and now you are irrevocably marked with this.
Costia walks through the flap of your tent then with a tray of tea and a few little biscuits that she bakes sometimes that you love, and she takes one look at you and then puts down the tray gently and hurries over to sit next to you.
You don’t say anything because she looks at the single blistering, raw mark on your chest and just takes your body into her arms. You wrap yours around her and put your head into her shoulder. You don’t cry; you just breathe in her smell—lavender and soap, which she taught you how to make years ago.
“Ai gaf yu otaim in,” she whispers. “I always want you.”
You take a deep breath and nod, and when you raise your head she looks into your eyes like there has never been any blood on your hands.
//
On your sixteenth birthday, you are drunk, and you sneak off with her after your annual feast to your place of flowers.
“Ai sonraun laik yu sonraun,” you say.
She smiles. “We are speaking Trigedasleng?”
“I have had a lot of wine, Costia.”
She laughs loudly. “Sha, Lexa.”
You kiss her softly. “Osir keryon ste teina.”
She rolls her eyes. “Nou dison, Heda.”
“Heda?”
She lifts a brow and you laugh when she rolls on top of you. “Haukom ste yu bilaik disha?”
You shrug with a grin. “Ai hod yu in, Costia.”
She shakes her head and then stares at you like she does sometimes, like she doesn’t understand how you’re here. Like you might disappear if she doesn’t. “Ste yu na camp run wor?”
You sigh and then lie back. You hold her hand for a long time. “Ai ste—scared,” you say, and you cannot think of a word in your own language that comes close to the same concept.
“Hodnes laik uf, Heda Lexa,” Costia whispers. “en ai hod yu in.”
“Yu ste ain,” you say. “You are mine.”
//
Costia lied to you only once: love is not strength.
//
One day, she isn’t in your tent after you finish your lesson with your political strategy tutor.
You send every single warrior you can; you go out yourself.
You do not find her, and you will never find her again.
The last time you see her face she has no body, and you have never understood hate until now.
//
You travel to the Ice Nation, and, technically, you are still Anya’s second, but she doesn’t stop your command: jus drein jus daun, after all.
You are furious, this terrifying, consuming violent fire filling your veins, sinking into your bones. You kill twenty-nine people to get to their queen, and when you do, you tie her to a tree. You hold a knife to her advisor’s throat and ask just exactly what she did to Costia.
And then you do those exact things yourself.
It does not make you strong; it does not take away any of the pain you’re feeling. Anya stands by and you have never been a child but now you are drowning in blood. You have been trained to die and you realize that there are so many ways to do this.
//
When you get back to Polis you are still and quiet as Anya burns thirty more marks into your chest. The pain seems irrelevant.
//
You take the lock of her hair that you have and go out to your field of flowers.
Sometimes you forgot that it is a graveyard for marrow bones, those exquisite, small, flying things.
It seems fitting: with shaking hands, this is where you bury Costia; this is where you bury your love.
You weep.
//
You make it your mission, after that, to wage peace as revenge: the fewer people who die at anyone else’s hand, the better.
You are trained for this too, and you tell yourself it is not compassion, but rather what a good leader would do for her people.
You remember from when you were small: they are not your people; you are theirs.
You have your nights alone, now, and so you refresh on all of the languages and dialects you know. You have enough power everywhere—you are Commander, after all—to call a meeting between the twelve clans. You have been consumed by vengeance and everyone seems to know it, so you hammer out a peace treaty and your threats of annihilation are taken seriously enough. It is, perhaps, not the diplomacy your political advisors had hoped for when you were young and wide eyed and idealistic, but you have thirty-one scars on your chest and no love left in the spaces underneath.
//
Except for then: a girl with golden hair and eyes like the clearest sea falls from the sky.
//
Clarke.
For some reason, you love how her name sounds, because it seems hard like armor but she is not. She reminds you of Costia in some ways: Clarke is a healer and Clarke is, at her core, you think, trustworthy and gentle and too honest.
She hands you Anya’s braid an your heart drops, because Anya saved you so many times. You were her second, and your birthright was always, always to sacrifice her before yourself, but you have never wanted this much death, this much blood on your hands.
//
You let Clarke kill Finn, because jus drein jus daun has become a prayer for you now, but you would have given anything to be able to give Costia the same gentle end, even if it came at the sake of your own life.
Maybe: especially if it came at that price.
Clarke makes all of the scars on your chest sting, and you do not want it.
So you tell her about Costia, make sure to speak formal, clipped English. You don’t ever talk about Costia and the words hurt to say but you have cried enough.
You nod when she asks if love is weakness. Clarke seems like she doesn’t believe you still, and there is a part of you that’s desperate to think she is right.
But there was a body burnt to ash in front of you both today, and the dead are gone and the living are hungry, and hope does not heal anything.
//
You break your arm again, and everything is there so fast. For one brief, thrilling, terrifying moment, you think you are going to die, to actually die.
It seems almost fitting; your life started, in most sense that you care about, because you shattered your wrist when you were seven and Costia brought you soothing tea, and whatever pain a gorilla would cause would be over quickly, and your spirit would find someone else, some small child with wide eyes and calm hands who never wanted to have to speak loudly or leave the sea or bury their leave in a field of hollow bones.
But: Clarke.
She refuses to let you die, and she shoots her loud, scary gun just above your head and then helps you into a cage. Your arm hurts—really hurts, and it’s a bad break—but Clarke is calm and she sets it quietly, fashions a sling without much issue.
You try to explain that maybe death would be easier, maybe you are exhausted from this war, but she won’t let you; you have already fallen in love with her, you know, but you allow yourself a moment to acknowledge it now.
You escape and you stay up all night keeping watch over this girl who is as shattered in some ways as you, this girl with wide eyes and calm hands and gold like the sun, this girl who fell from the sky and is not afraid in the slightest to touch you.
//
You let 250 of your people die, because you need to win this war and you need peace and you need Clarke.
You need Clarke—it would be so easy to say: Ai gaf yu in, Clarke.
But instead she backs you up against a table and your palms sting because you so badly want to touch her. You think she wants to kiss you, so you say, “Not everyone.”
She swallows.
“Not you.”
//
You do want her, and it is the scariest thing you have ever felt.
You kiss her and it yanks at everything you’ve tucked into your hollows.
She says not yet and that means maybe someday and you have been raised to die but you, for the first time in so long, do not feel ready.
//
You are prepared to have more blood and more scars if it means saving Clarke, and you are terrifyingly weak, you think.
But then you get an offer; in your head—your, by all accounts, brilliant political mind—you know that taking a treaty with Mt. Weather is the more humane option, the better political option, the option that does best by your people: 250 of your people have already died in this war; there are hundreds of your people still left inside and the largest army that you’ve ever seen outside. Everyone listens to you when you tell them to stop, and that must count for something.
You have a choice, though: you can choose saving all of your people without any more casualties to them, and no more deaths or experiments to them; after almost an entire century. You can sacrifice 47 people for your entire civilization.
You know that this is what you have to do; there is no actual choice. You have been constructed and taught and beaten into some hard, angled shape by duty. From the minute you were born, there has never been another option.
You agree and you allow yourself a moment, just one, when no one is paying attention to you, to let your heart break, because this is the last moment you will never be yourself: you cannot choose love, and you never will be able to again.
//
But still: every single part of you wanted to pick Clarke.
Every single part of you wanted to take her back to Polis after you have won this war—and you will win, one way or another; this is war and you have not come this far to lose—and to take her hand, kiss her, show her the huge marketplace and the grand baths and the places you grew into your self. You want her to touch your tattoos—the ones for Anya and Gustus and the 300 people of yours that she herself killed, now—and kiss your litter of scars. You want her to tell you, firmly and quietly, to say her name and you want her fingers inside of you and you want to make you forget the touch of other hands.
You want to take her to your field of flowers and bones and let her hold you while you mourn.
Every single part of you that has ever wanted anything like redemption wants to keep her safe, and you have said it for years now, ever since you saw Costia’s pretty mouth open in a last prayer that you could never, ever answer—you are only a girl. You are only a girl and you would die for love because you cannot—never have, never will be able to—live for love: bodies lining the floor, kisses and stains in the night.
You could’ve had this if a different part of you was braver. But you have been raised for sacrifices, have been raised and beaten and cut apart, so that you know by now to prevent that for your people in any way you can.
You are their savior and their sacrifice and their alter and their final resting place, and your hands have never been your own. Love is weakness because you will give up yours so your people can have theirs, and it will break your heart.
Clarke’s eyes are big and full of tears and you want to kneel at her feet and ask her forgiveness.
But you are Commander, and your heart has never been yours anyway.
You have already died so many times.
//
The walk to the capital is dark and cold.
When you get there, you cut off one of your braids and walk out under the stars, dig a small hole with your shaking hands in the hard ground. You bury yourself once and for all, because you cannot afford to be Lexa, not ever again, and then you sit and put a hand to your chest, trace the braille of scar tissue over your beating heart and silent lungs.
You mourn all of your dead and wonder if peace will always feel like a silent field of graves.