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The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep
There’s a room, somewhere. It’s late afternoon and no-one is looking for them, not yet. Time piles up in the corners like dust, and soon it will spill over and wash them back into the world. The boundary line waits invisible under the earth for these few hours yet and she reaches across the space between them just to reassure herself that she can. Lexa’s skin is soft as Clarke’s fingers trace falling stars on her back, and it feels like free-fall; those precious seconds of longing right before they burn up in the atmosphere.
The first night is a blur. There are tunnels under the stables and they’re running blindly in the dark. She stumbles, catching her foot with her breath in between choked sobs and Murphy is there instantly pulling her along. Then suddenly there’s fresh air and hooded figures and someone is cursing and manhandling her onto a horse. Arms – Octavia’s, she recognises – hold her steady and they’re galloping into the darkness.
Seven circles for seven deaths. Black ink for black blood. What happened to number eight? Clarke’s fingers feel too rough and clumsy, and before Lexa can turn over Octavia is shaking her awake.
“Clarke.”
The furs are gone and she’s lying on grass, and something warm and sticky is trickling into her eye.
“Clarke!”
Blearily awareness trickles back. The ambush. A patrol from Arkadia waiting to strike the moment they left the cover of the trees. A tall man in a guard jacket lunging at her, the butt of his rifle swinging up. She probably had time to move if she’d wanted to, and by the disdainful look on her face Octavia knows it.
“This is your new plan, huh? Dying won’t make you feel better, Clarke. You think that’s what the Commander would have wanted?”
Octavia knows nothing of Lexa’s fealty or her grace or her wisdom. Part of Clarke wants to scream it, wants people to know whose mercy they owe their lives to. But there’s another selfish part of her that wants to keep everything to herself: the feel of Lexa’s lips under her own and the steel in her gaze locked away inside her own chest like just telling people will cause it to spill out and she’ll lose Lexa in pieces all over again.
Clarke shoves the other girl away and forces herself to her feet. She only lasts for a second before the world is tilting sharply and Octavia grabs her, swearing.
*
With Arkadia shored up by ammunition and food supplies looted from surrounding villages the war drags into a stalemate. The very air swells with frustrated bloodlust as the deadlock strains into spring, waiting to rain brimstone when the siege breaks.
They waited inside the boundary line at first, watching for a chance to get inside the walls through the tunnel, but when news of the Commander’s death reached the front lines there was nothing holding back the twelve armies at the perimeter. Now they have no chance of getting inside: they haven’t heard anything since the radio batteries died, and they have to leave before reinforcements arrive and they’re crushed between the hammer and the anvil.
The tree bark is rough and uncomfortable against her back, and they’ve been travelling, running, for days.
She envies others their sleep as she keeps forced vigil under the moonlight. It’s pale and cold; a weak imitation of dust motes dancing in golden sunlight behind her eyelids. They’ll have burned Lexa’s body by now. Dressed her in white with flowers woven through her braids while earth yields to fire, again.
Clarke sees more hours of darkness now, and it’s like after the mountain again. In Polis for a time the stars left her be and she woke to daylight and a bed that felt empty despite it being hers alone.
She catches glimpses in the fragments between heartbeats. In the place between asleep and awake ghostly fingertips trail over her skin before the cool night air brushes them aside.
They move east. Trikru lands are the safest of all their unsafe options. Murphy has some kind of map and they’re following it. Clarke doesn’t ask where they’re going or why.
The sea is iron grey and cold, and the salty air stings her chapped lips. There are other lands out there, she knows, she’s longed for them before through the porthole window before all that green meant something other than closed eyelids stained with black blood from her fingers.
The waves lap around her knees and she curls her toes in the sand. Her back may not be marked but she carries the weight of all her deaths around her neck all the same. It will be enough. All the empty space left in the world from lives she’s taken and there’s still not enough room for her to breathe.
She takes a step forward, then another. She would run but the water is too heavy around her thighs, and the ocean knows she doesn’t deserve to make this quick.
Black water closes over her head and her feet scrabble uselessly trying to remember instinct lost generations ago.
Can we talk about something else? Lexa rolls to face her and Clarke gasps a lungful of icy water seeing those eyes again, and the shock jerks her back. The bed is dissolving and hands, the wrong hands, are rolling her over and something is pounding into her back and won’t let her speak to beg Lexa to stay, this time.
*
Sometimes she tortures herself thinking of all she could have done differently: if she hadn’t let her lips linger addicted to Lexa’s neck and shoulder as they got dressed, or if she’d taken another minute fixing her clothing. Any minute detail to stop Lexa’s opening the damn door in that godforsaken second.
Other days it seems impossible that such grossly unfortunate timing could be anything but inevitable. What else but some kind cosmic conspiracy would put Lexa in the way of a bullet moments after she’d been sleep-soft and heavy in Clarke’s arms while they both pretended it could last.
Maybe they’d been spiralling towards it forever: since you’re the one , since the dropship had landed, since fire scorched the Earth and was quenched in black blood. Perhaps the gun was loaded from the start and the trigger was pulled a thousand times with every shared nod and by every one of their people they’d tried to save.
That’s why I -
She never stays long enough to finish Lexa’s sentence.
*
“The only thing the world needs saving from is you.”
There’s a failsafe somewhere, a manual override. Murphy found a reference to it in Becca’s mansion, and Clarke had pretended not to notice the quiet relief on his face when she took the chip from his unresisting hands and swallowed it.
ALIE smiles. “From us. We’re not so different, Clarke.”
Clarke almost laughs from the bitterness spilling over in her chest and the fucking irony of this. “Oh, I’ll be right behind you.” She finds the lever and throws her whole bodyweight against it. The last thing she feels is heat and flames and a vague sense of falling.
She doesn’t know what happens now, whether the thread that tethered coded souls to the Earth was severed when the sacred flame was destroyed. She tries to open her eyes but there’s nothing and for the first time she’s terrified of the darkness; that she’s waited too long, again.
Then there’s candlelight behind her eyelids, and the stillness of a long ago afternoon. Clarke’s breath is long gone but somehow she loses it again.
There’s Lexa. Lexa young and whole and smiling like their second-last goodbye.
She’s in Clarke’s arms like she never left. Lexa’s lips map her neck, her jaw, whisper against the shell of her ear, and this feels nothing like drowning.
“This place is not for you, not yet.”
“You're here. Don't make me go back.”
A quick press of Lexa's lips against hers, all too fleeting, and then their foreheads are touching. “I can't make you go, Clarke, the choice has to be yours.” Lexa's long fingers cup her cheeks while her palms cradle Clarke’s jaw. “But I will wait.”
Clarke feels the fine bones of Lexa's wrist under her fingers, the rise of a small faded scar she never noticed before and it seems like a greater tragedy, a symbol of all that was denied to them. All of Lexa, all of the patches on her body and her soul that Clarke should have had time to memorise. They were never given time to linger, to let night spill into morning while the stars faded without her giving thought to missing them.
All they could choose was to leave again and again. “I can't.” She doesn't know whose tears wet her cheeks.
“You can, you are strong. Just this once more, ai niron.”
“And then we'll have time.”
“All of it.” The kiss that seals the promise is slow and wistful for all they could have had. Lexa’s tongue dances across her lips and Clarke breathes out forever.
*
She wakes up after a week to Abby’s tears quickly brushed away but still damp in the fabric of her shirt, and Raven hovering awkwardly on crutches in the doorway like she’s trying to decide if she’d rather be somewhere else. When Abby has to leave the Mechanic takes Clarke’s hand silently and holds it until she falls back to sleep.
The first night she’s released from the med bay she spends shaking and alone in her windowless room.
Raven wordlessly notes the shadows under her eyes even deeper than usual, and the following evening tugs her by the hand into her own quarters adjacent to the workshops.
They don’t talk about the City. She doesn’t need to ask to know who Raven saw right at the end, who perhaps one day will wait for her in another room far above the Earth. It’s a strange thing to share ghosts with someone; to know that if Finn - the boy from the dropship, the one they both loved - lingered anywhere it would be here with the metal walls ringing to the sound of Raven’s hollow laughter.
She wonders when this became normal, when they’d accepted the dead among the living.
Raven has surgery and her leg’s still not fixed. (She knew it wouldn’t be.) But her motion and weight bearing improves and it’s less often that Clarke has to check her alcohol tinged breathing and turn Raven onto her side after she falls asleep just incase.
And maybe they start to heal, by pieces.
Octavia still sleeps under the sky. They understand one another better now. The thing about an impasse is if you stand in the same place with someone for long enough it starts to look like you're on the same side.
After she cleans Pike’s blood from her sword Octavia never speaks of Lincoln’s death and Clarke pieces together fragments from what others tell her and what they leave out. They both loved people who tried to forge peace from bloody, violent clay and it brought them both here, alone. Two violent halves of something no-longer whole.
Ontari’s reign was cataclysmic and short-lived and the blood she spilled has yet to drain away into the earth around Arkadia. Octavia backs her unquestioningly this time when the pendulum swings back to Clarke again and she has to hold her people back from another massacre, because although everyone is tired of war apparently they’re never tired enough and there’s always more blood to be spilled.
(There’s a moment she almost doesn’t. There’s a second where Clarke wants to reave her vengeance on the Earth and its people and spread her pain and guilt and the burden she’s been carrying for so long that she doesn’t remember the girl who stepped off the dropship. But she meets Octavia’s eyes and knows they’re thinking the same thing; that they have to be better.)
Your legacy will be peace. She will make it so.
Sometimes in her dreams it didn’t happen. She’s riding into the city as it exists in her memory, guards opening doors before her and inclining their heads in reluctant respect. Her heart thuds as she climbs the last set of stairs, turns the last corner.
The woman on the throne rises to greet her then Clarke is rushing into her arms. Sometimes the room empties around them, sometimes they’re alone from the start, but always Lexa kisses her with sweetness and such relief even though in this world they were never parted by more than miles.
In some ways she prefers the nightmares.
*
Jus drein jus daun. This seems like the best way to pay for the blood on her hands, since she can’t seem to scrub them clean. Maybe red can wash away black, like a bloody sunrise on her skin.
Her mother teaches her willingly, gratefully, tries to pour relief and hope into her daughter alongside anatomy and pharmacology. The biology at least she learns quickly.
Abby doesn’t give her a key to the locker where they keep the last of the Ark medicines. The first time Jackson makes to pass Clarke a scalpel her mother knocks it from his hands unthinkingly, forgetting in an instant of terror that most of their people carry knives these days anyway.
The exiled remnants of Ontari’s followers advance on Arkadia when the prospect of scavenging in the wild for another winter forces their hand.
Clarke rides out to meet them, unarmed except for a knife in her sleeve. She doesn’t particularly care if they shoot her, but she won’t be taken alive. Octavia’s war band were due to leave at dawn and she guesses they won’t be far behind her now.
She lowers her hood. Charcoal from last night's fires is smeared across her eyes and drips down her cheeks
The outlaws slip like wraiths from the trees and sometimes her dreams start like this. She has to stop herself looking for Maya and Wells instinctively in the faces of the left-behind.
“Wanheda.” Their leader has the same expression Roan wore: wariness on the heels of surprise. She doesn’t look like a threat, but on the ground all that means is that her weapons are hidden. “You have come to surrender?”
She’s never had nor required an army at her back but he’s still scanning the trees behind her rather than meeting her gaze.
“I’ve come to tell you to run.”
He smirks and draws closer on his horse. The tip of his sword blade caresses her neck. “Or?”
“Or,” she leans forward in the saddle and the steel bites into her skin. His eyes flicker with the barest uncertainty to the trickle of blood and she smiles, slowly. “I will burn you alive.”
One of the guards laughs later on when he tells her how the Trikru children take turns to chase one another pretending to be Wanheda. Clarke finishes his stitches and throws up after he leaves; bile burning her mouth.
*
Octavia represents Skaikru at the Ascension Day formalities. Clarke hasn’t met the new Commander, hasn’t asked about whatever arrangement they reached for selection after the two AI’s burned one another out. This one is the third since Ontari: apparently Lexa’s skills in both single combat and political wrangling were a rarer combination than anyone anticipated.
Wanheda rode with this far with Octavia’s entourage but Clarke slipped away at the city limit.
The evening paints the snow red on the mountains where they strain upwards craving the sky. They’ve been doing it forever she thinks; their silhouette hasn’t changed since before the world ended and she takes the slightest grain of comfort in knowing that her own release will come sooner.
Her mind drifts back along its well-worn path to another Ascension Day, another sunset, that lit golden veins in Lexa’s hair where it spilled over her face. It makes Clarke’s breath catch still thinking of that moment caught in time where Lexa hovered over her smiling hope and promise.
She’s more patient now. Time has eroded the ragged edges of the abyss in her chest: she knows where Lexa is waiting and it soothes a little of the urgency. Not long, ai hodnes. Not long now.
*
They ran out of barbiturate over a year ago and the replacement is a natural imitation dreamed up by Nyko and Monty. It’s a slower mechanism, and she feels a twinge of envy every time she’s in her scrubs watching a patient’s eyes flicker shut in the visible moment of relief before sleep catches up with numbness.
Sometimes she’s the one closing their eyes, and dying always looks easier on other people. She wonders what they’re seeing: long gone faces that never grew old or just quiet blissful darkness.
A patient seizes one day when she’s trying to examine him: the unconscious blow sends her reeling and she hears the sickening thud her own head makes against the floor before her eyes close.
The corridor stretches ahead of her for an instant, lit by flaming torches that are abruptly quenched when someone dumps cold water on her face.
Clarke’s eyes spark open.
“Raven?”
The woman looks so relieved Clarke almost feels bad. Raven can tell, of course she can. “Hoping for someone else?”
Clarke doesn’t bother answering that.
That night they drink a bottle of moonshine on the roof of the mech shed. There’s a peaceful lull at the moment, and it can’t last. It’s quiet and warm and starlit which means they are definitely, definitely doomed.
Her sudden laughter has Raven looking around in concern. “What’s up with you now, Griffin?”
Clarke bumps their shoulders together gently. “Same as you.”
It coaxes a smile from Raven as she tugs the bottle out of Clarke’s grasp. “I’ll drink to that then.”
Raven’s lips are still close enough for Clarke to think (not for the first time) about closing the distance. But she knows how that goes and it’s less than Raven deserves.
They hold hands instead and fall asleep before the sun rises.
*
There is trouble on the borders again. Word arrives ahead of the wounded and Clarke preps the med bay with a familiar prickle down her spine, like she hasn’t felt in a long time.
Summer drags on and the Council insists that everything is fine, and if she squints it all looks eerily familiar. Octavia is more candid when Clarke installs herself at the next Council meeting daring anyone to throw her out, and briefly amused in spite of the situation realising that over the years they’ve somehow managed to swap places.
Octavia is formidable these days. She splits her time between Council meetings and Trikru formalities and weaves something of the two with stubbornness Kane didn’t have and faith that Clarke never managed to extend further than one person. Her small niece serves as her second because the closest forgiveness she could bear still missed by a generation, and Blakes and war is a thread Clarke will leave to someone else to untangle.
The skirmishes drag on until there’s an ambush to the south where autumn rains have washed away whatever was left of the road. Clarke rides out with Nyko’s second, med bag thumping rhythmically with the hoofbeats where it’s slung across her chest.
There’s a Trikru warrior on the ground with his abdomen gaping open. She guesses he’s barely sixteen; rolling his eyes and incoherent with pain. He looks a little like Aden if he’d had the chance to grow up.
She’s too busy trying to reassure him and pack the wound to notice the quiet. There’s no birdsong, and a stillness in the forest that she should recognise as deliberate.
The first arrow enters just below her ribs.
She ducks her head and grits her teeth and keeps pressure on the boy's wound, hunching down to keep him covered as best she can. Pain and heat sear across her side and she ignores it. She's been bleeding out for years.
The second arrow bites lower, deeper, and she hears her own cry of pain as though from a distance.
There are sunspots in her eyes, and she can’t look up, can’t turn her head because all her strength and focus is pressing down. There’s the noise of engines and the crackle of gunfire.
Someone, she thinks Miller, is trying to check her wounds.
“Hold on Clarke, it's gonna be ok.” He's not a doctor; he’s scared of hurting her more and not applying nearly enough pressure in the right places to stem the bleeding. She’ll die for his kindness. It’s more than she deserves, really.
“Stay with me, Clarke.” Miller's lips move but it isn't his voice she hears; isn’t his inflection that folds around her name like something precious, something worth preserving.
Someone is carrying the boy away. She hopes he lives. She hopes she's earned that.
The day is overcast and chilly but her skin is bathed in sunlight under the trees, and all she can see is green.
The stone flags of the corridor are cool beneath her feet, just like when she last walked this way so long ago.
She pushes open the door once again and she’s barely eighteen.
There’s a figure waiting on the balcony; loose hair unbound and crownless at long last. A queen after the sweet release of revolution, and she smiles wider now than Clarke ever saw in life.
There's just the two of them now, in the peace at the end of the world.
She tangles her fingers in the soft curls at the nape of Lexa’s neck, already laughing as she draws her in.
Lexa kisses her home, and it feels like dawn.
*