Chapter Text
I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.
They don't come back after five years. Not even after the sixth. Or after the seventh.
Between the end of the seventh and the beginning of the eighth year since Praimfaya something starts to change. She doesn't give up hoping, she doesn't think she ever will. She just stops waiting.
The bunker remains unreachable; her radio calls are still unanswered.
Clarke continues to live her times of peace, even if that peace has taken the form of war into her heart.
In the spring of the sixth year, an unexpected arrival forces her to reconsider everything she believed true and to take up arms again.
*
"I will help you, if you open the bunker."
Hyp is curled up on her shoulder and can't take his eyes off Diyoza's daemon.
Clarke can't blame him. She is having trouble concentrating too. He’s an armadillo. It's the first time she's ever seen one. His armour gleams like a sword's iron in the dim light, a glimmer of danger that invites caution.
Diyoza's expression is as impenetrable as the scales of her soul. "Why should I agree with your request?"
It's a legitimate question, yet she feels a spark of annoyance. Two apocalypses and still the old questions, the usual congenital selfishness and the instinct of preservation intended only for their own kind.
“We're all that's left of the human race,” she replies, trying to hold back the vexation she feels, the desire to tell her that this is my home. These are my rules. Take or leave. She bites her tongue. She needs Diyoza more than Diyoza needs her. They both know it and it's useless to beat around the bush.
"I don't want my daughter to grow up in the old world. Do ut des. Are you in?"
She holds out her hand.
The seconds turn into a minute. Neither of them blinks nor move a muscle. Standing next to Diyoza, Shaw and his raven daemon fidget uneasily.
Finally, Diyoza hands out her hand to hold hers. Her grip is strong and firm, as is her voice while she lists her terms with functional practicality. "I want a map of the Valley. I want for it to be split evenly before I open that damned bunker."
Clarke nods. Hyp's tail stops thumping tensely against her back.
*
Dust fills her field of vision, but it doesn't stop her from seeing beyond it.
No matter how many years have passed, Atalanta remains the most colourful thing she has ever laid eyes on. The cobalt blue head, the red throat, the purple tail and the plumage on the rest of the body of that vibrant petroleum green.
She remembers another day. An open door to the unknown and then the sensory explosion. The air saturated with the smells of the forest and the shouts of jubilation of a hundred adolescents who were discovering for the first time what it meaned to breathe deeply without feeling guilty. The euphoria of those who taste the freedom of being themselves for the first time.
The nostalgia of the old days at the Dropship is so acute that she could cry.
Hyp nuzzles his head against her neck in a gesture that is part comfort, part admonition. Right. This is not the time to indulge in a trip down memory lane. Clarke takes a step forward out of the dust and light that streams in through the hole in the ceiling she just lowered from.
The warrior-queen who comes to meet her is nothing like the girl of the past. She looks like an image torn from a mythological tale. Like Penthesilea, the queen of the Amazons.
"Octavia," she says. She sees her blink, still that dazed expression, as if she's having trouble remembering the existence of the sun, as if she's awakening from the horror of a long nightmare. Half of her face is covered in tribal paint, like a tattoo that embraces the obstinacy of those who have not given in and never fallen, that invites roughness.
"Clarke?" She croaks. Even her voice is different. Harsh, hoarse. As if she'd spent the last few years screaming so loud it filled her vocal cords with blood. Clarke easily recognizes the symptoms. She knows what it feels like. "Where is my brother?"
She swallows hard. Suddenly she feels like she's been caught in a sandstorm. "I’m sorry."
Octavia seems to understand. She narrows her eyes which for a split second express the same pain that has been piercing her chest in regular waves for six years by now. It is no longer the lingering pain of an amputation, of a phantom limb. It's mourning. She is ready to see that pain explode, transformed into something powerful, mutated into anger, and turn into blood red like revenge.
Clarke says no more. Octavia won't let her. When she hugs her, muscles of steel and sheer strength, she feels like a thief. She is stealing someone else's moment. It’s not to her that this indomitable joy should be directed. "I'm glad at least you're here."
The reunion is short-lived. Diyoza descends with McCreary and Clarke watches closely as she talks to Octavia. She studies their reactions.
Hyp points out the encrustations of blood on the floor, the iron grates, the throne in the corner and wrong, he whispers in her ear. Always the voice of reason. There is something awful and wrong. Don’t you smell the fear?
When Diyoza asks how many people they will save, Octavia answers before she can say anything. "Seven hundred and forty-two."
Diyoza doesn't bat an eyelid, despite the fact that the number is much lower than the one they expected. "We can carry two at a time." Already operational, she turns to address the crowd watching from behind the grates, motionless and silent. Too motionless, too silent.
"Not yet," she interjects, overcoming the cold that has wedged into her bones. Both women turn to look at her and she doesn't know what is worse, if Diyoza's frown or Octavia's blank expression.
Clarke walks up to the last one, aware of the sullen looks from the group of guards surrounding Octavia, from the crowd following her every move. She leans forward so that she’s the only one who can hear. “Send them away,” she whispers. “We need to talk.”
*
"The Valley is ours by right."
"Why? Do you think that having arrived here first you can claim the right to priority?"
"This won’t do," Hyp says. Clarke couldn't agree more.
"Stop it," she orders matter-of-factly. "Diyoza, give me a moment alone with her."
Even once the door closes, the belligerent expression on Octavia's thin face doesn't change.
"What do you want, Clarke?" Atalanta flies towards her, her once trilling voice now sharp and cutting like a whistle. "You have no power here."
"No, but you do," she replies without the slightest hesitation. She's starting to recognize the menace hanging in Octavia's gaze. She knows what it means and it breaks her heart. It is survivor's guilt, shame mixed with remorse. "I don't know what happened to you over the years. I can imagine. I know how you feel because I've been there. We carry the burden so they don't have to."
Octavia's eyelashes quiver like fluttering wings, like Atalanta's feathers. They cast restless shadows on her pronounced cheekbones, brutally highlighting her extreme gauntness and shedding a dramatic light on what, exactly, her impossible choice may have been.
"Whatever choice you were forced to make, however horrible it was, it was necessary and allowed you to survive."
Atalanta flutters close to Octavia's cheek who winces in response.
"Four hundred and fifty-eight dead."
The usual Blake. Despite the differences, it's always amazing to realize how similar they are. The thought doesn’t have the usual exasperated fondness. On the contrary, it fills her with stinging sadness.
"Seven hundred still alive," Hyp replies on her behalf when her lack of response is becoming noticeable. His tail coils around her neck in a comforting caress and the agony becomes bearable again, recedes like the undertow.
"You don’t understand." The alarm with which she looks at them is also tormenting doubt. Octavia's anguish is the same that haunted her for months before meeting Madi. Sole survivor in a world of ashes and impending doom. She remembers the fear, the anger, the self-pity. The sense of oppression and the madness of it all exacerbated by loneliness. "If I don't have that Valley, what will I have achieved? What was the point of everything I've done?"
Clarke hears the words she didn't say. What's left for me? Beyond regret and mourning? Beyond the horror of what I was forced to do, what have I become?
At that she would like to reply: me. You have me.
She knows that it wouldn't be enough. He would have been, maybe. His presence would have been sufficient to awaken a spark of humanity. In her case, on the other hand, she knows all too well she doesn't have the same impact.
And despite it all, there is no harm in trying.
Clarke takes a step forward and sees Hyp do the same, approaching Octavia and wagging his tail as if he wants to snuggle against her.
“It took you here, it brought you where you are today. Exactly to this moment. Make the right choice. Forget the past. We can live in peace. These people aren't a threat if you don't make them one."
She waits and watches with bated breath the woman and the daemon before her. The intense gaze that Octavia and Atalanta exchange strikes a twinge of hope in her. Perhaps they can still find a solution, a compromise. Perhaps-
“I'm not like you,” Octavia says. Clarke's hope burns like an evergreen devoured by the flames of Hell. “I will not deny who I am just because it's convenient. I will have that Valley and if you are not with me then you are against me. You are wronku, or you are the enemy of wronku. Choose."
*
Diyoza stares at her, folding her arms over her middle. “I assume it didn't turn out as you'd hoped,” she comments.
Clarke doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. "That's one way to put it."
“I need to know where your loyalties lie, Wanheda.”
Wanheda. The past that comes knocking again. She closes her eyes and exhales, but it's like throwing salt on a wound that has never healed. “News travels fast around here.”
“Only if you're smart enough to sort the useful from the junk. And based on what little I've observed and from the few conversations we've had you seem to be the only one who doesn't crave war. I’d hate to make your daughter an orphan. I'll ask you another time. Whose side are you on?”
Clarke thinks about Octavia's hostility. She can't turn a blind eye and deny the truth, dismissing Octavia’s vicious hunger for revenge against the cruelty that the world has hurled at her from the moment she was born.
“I stand with those who choose peace.”
Diyoza doesn't look away from her. There is reluctant approval, an invitation to camaraderie that Clarke doesn't feel ready to accept yet. “I promised you I would open the bunker. I fulfilled my end of the bargain. Now it's your turn to fulfill yours."
It's only fair. Clarke nods. "I'll talk to my mother."
"And your friend? She doesn't seem inclined to find common ground."
Hyp's breathing is ragged and Clarke feels his body writhe under her leather jacket as if he's prey to spasms. Their meeting with Octavia unsettled them more than they are willing to admit. “I already have a plan for that.” She doesn't know if she's ready to do what it takes to bring it to fruition, but it's a concern for after.
Of course, Diyoza is quick to catch her hesitation. “Killing her would be the fastest solution. We've both seen enough battlefields to know that the story that every life has value is just a fairy tale. One life to save hundreds is worth a little cynicism and a guilty conscience."
It would be the fastest solution, it's true.
“You care about her,” Diyoza says. “More than you care about the rest of them. Why?"
The answers could be many. Guilt. She has never forgiven herself for abandoning Octavia out of the bunker. Affection. Despite their disagreements, Octavia remains part of her family. Ultimately, the one thing that has the upper hand is-
“I knew her brother.” Another spasm. Instead of yelping, Hyp sinks his fangs into her shoulder. The stab of pain that pierces her there is preferable to the one that cuts through her rib cage. “If he were here, he would do everything in his power to protect her. My sister, my responsibility. It’s what he would say."
Her eyes are dry, but they must reveal more than she would like. Diyoza's understanding is not condescension, but the empathy that Octavia seems unable to experience.
“That's admirable, I admit it. But do you know what else your friend is? Not here. The rest of us are and we’re the ones who have to deal with her. So, you've made your choice?”
*
“Natrona.”
Hyp is growling and Clarke wonders how they got to this. Enemies instead of allies. On opposite sides of a useless war that could have ended without any bloodshed. Worse yet, one that they could have avoided in the first place if only Octavia had been less prideful and blinded by her own greed. Consumed as she is by power.
Maybe she is. Maybe Octavia is right about her and Clarke really is the traitor she accuses her of being.
She imagines Madi, forced into the same fighting pit she is right now. She thinks of Diyoza, the bump that her jacket will serve to hide only for a little while longer. Her mother, haunted by Kane's ghost as she is by the ghosts of the friends that she lost in Praimfaya, her second family. There are people she is no longer willing to lose, and if to keep them safe being considered a natrona by her own people is the only weapon in her arsenal, then so be it.
“No, I'm not. You are,” she says, and picks up the sword thrown at her from the stands.
When Octavia lunges at her, Clarke fights back. Not to strike or counterattack, but in defence. Face against face, one blade pointed at the other's throat, she tries not to think of Bellamy, of what he would think of her seeing her lift a weapon against his sister.
"You are putting your interests before the common good. We can still have peace. We could, if you were willing to relinquish your power. Your word is no longer law. The dark years are over."
Octavia wriggles violently, growling and biting, with the cry of misery of a wounded lion. Another attack, this time more violent than those that preceded it, made ruthless by brutal force and frustration.
Clarke has no choice but to continue to block, dodge and parry the fury of her onslaught, waiting for a breach. Her goal is to incapacitate her, even if it's a risky strategy. Octavia is no longer the girl she used to be and six years of peace have transformed her body into something softer and heavier than the lethal machine that Octavia’s has remained instead.
It's dumb luck and a successful hit to decree the end of the fight. As Octavia thrusts the blade at her, catching her in the side, Hyp jumps at Octavia who, caught off guard, loosens her grip around the hilt. That's all she needs. Clarke is already on her knees; she just has to move her leg to throw Octavia off balance and make her fall. Atalanta flies against her, but Hyp is faster and holds her back.
She rises with a staggering effort, grabs her sword and throws it away. She's not naïve enough to believe that Octavia is ready to accept defeat. She doesn't draw Octavia's sword from her stomach. She is crazy, but not to this extent. The pain in her side is excruciating and blurs her vision and even then, Clarke has felt worse. While securing the blade with one hand, she addresses the people huddled behind the iron grates. "Listen to me, it doesn't have to go this way! War can still be avoided! It's not the only choice!”
Her voice is stentorian in the deathly silence. The anger and hatred in Octavia's eyes are clear.
Before she sees them, she hears it. The sudden silence of hundreds of people holding their breath as if facing something miraculous, and Octavia's loathing that wasn't directed at her, not only at least.
An honorific she had hoped to never hear again.
“Heda.”
Basajaun forces his way into the fighting pits, and at once all the daemons bow to show respect, as they recognize him as the lord of the woods. Horror and surprise overtake the hurt as Clarke realizes it. Bas has taken his final shape. He's not a stag like Lexa's daemon was, but something equally imposing and regal. A kudu, with a grey-blue fur and a powerful body like that of a buffalo, with a stage of majestic horns at least three-foot-long.
“Madie, no. What have you done?"
Madi, her little natblida, observes her with the eyes of the past, those of someone to whom she said goodbye many lives ago: eyes made intense by very long eyelashes in the outline of a warrior mask. “I did what you would’ve if you could. I swallowed my fear, and I did what I had to do." Her gaze focuses on Octavia and her expression hardens. “My people, my responsibility.”
*
Diyoza joins her, soldier's posture and arms against her sides, but Clarke knows that if they were alone, she would wrap them protectively around her stomach.
They observe the scene below quietly: the coronation of a child-queen.
Clarke continues to breathe around the heartbreak. She holds her bandaged hip as if that is the cause of her distress. Hyp's broken yelps aren't quite as silent.
“Will they listen to her?” Diyoza asks.
“Within her reside the consciences of the previous Commanders. They will follow her,” she says like a promise. Actually, it's a prayer. “For them, it's an act of faith.”
*
"We have a problem."
So, what's new, Hyp mumbles into her neck and Clarke swallows a bitter laugh. They’re on the edge of a dangerous precipice, one step away from yet another senseless war for the domination of the last remnant of life on the planet and exhaustion is consuming her like a fire that is impossible to put out.
Diyoza stopped talking. It doesn’t matter. Clarke figured as much. McCreary didn’t keep the deal. In the face of a potential missile attack it won't be long before Madi feels compelled to take to the battlefield to deal justice and retribution. Her daughter may be a pacifist, but she has made it clear that she is a firm supporter of the law of retaliation. She is hard-and-fast, fair, with no mercy towards those who have been judged unworthy of receiving it.
"My mother?" she asks, even though she already knows the answer. Her cards are always against her.
“Held hostage by McCreary,” Diyoza replies predictably.
“Do you think Shaw will surrender?”
Zeke knows the risks of unlocking the missile launch codes. However, despite his bravado, he's also a good man. In this case that could be the undoing of them all.
“He could if they tortured Abby in front of him.”
*
“Tell me you have a plan,” Hyp says in the general chaos.
“It's risky,” Clarke says.
Hyp flashes her a snarling grin. “When it isn’t?”
Clarke shouldn't laugh at this, but she can't help herself.
Diyoza and her daemon look at the both of them as if they have gone mad. Maybe they have. Maybe they always have been. The truth is that she and Hyp know, statistically speaking, that these are the few moments of sanity, the rare respites from one catastrophe until the next.
“So, it's war?” Diyoza asks and this time her concern is so obvious that she doesn't care about hiding the protectives with which she embraces her abdomen.
Clarke wishes things had been different. She wishes she could go back in time and start over. She wonders where exactly it went wrong. What chain of events led to this epilogue. What she should have done to not get to this point of no return.
Most of all she would like to look at the woman in front of her and give a different answer. Circumstances are beyond their will and it is with a heavy heart that she replies, "It’s war."
*
The result of the impasse in which they find themselves can only lead to dramatic results.
Clarke seeks her mother's gaze and finds it just before the end.
Diyoza has the gun pointed at her belly and McCreary's bloodshot eyes stare at her as if it's the first time he’s really seen her, as if he's bringing the world into focus after a time immemorial.
By the time he notices Shaw it's too late. Two shots go off, fired simultaneously. McCreary dies instantly. Her mother doesn’t.
While Diyoza commands Shaw to stop the countdown, Clarke runs to her mother's bedside. A single glance at the wound is enough to know that there is nothing to be done.
Cassiel's blue plumage is already tinged with red and the blood won't stop.
She can't breathe. She can't speak. She can't even form a coherent thought apart from the fact that she can't lose her too, not like this, not after she's just found her.
Abby reaches out a shaking hand to her face. Clarke squeezes it between hers. She is not the drug-addled woman of the last few weeks, but the mother she remembers: loving, brave and strong. "You did good," she whispers and her breath is ragged, it has the wet sound of blood that must have filled her lungs. Talking must be agony. "I'm so proud of you, Clarke. So proud."
Don’t leave me. I can't lose you too.
The noise she emits isn’t human. It doesn’t come from her. Hyp whines again. Something inside her cracks wide open as the light leaves her mother's eyes and Cassiel reverts to Dust.
Clarke continues to embrace her mother’s lifeless body for what seems an untold amounts of time with Hyp curled up and petrified between them.
"Clarke." Diyoza's voice is forceful, but retains a sympathetic trace. It joins her in the haze of her sorrow. "You have to get up. I know it seems impossible right now, but you will overcome it."
Everything about her rejects the idea. (There will come a time, a couple of years later, an evening of despair and angry helplessness spent drinking crappy liquor distilled from tree sap, when Diyoza will tell the truth behind the scar that marks her throat. The day will come when the woman standing in front of her will be a companion, a friend and ally, when she will fill a void that Clarke was convinced no one would ever be able to fill again. That day is not today.)
When she is roughly tackled from behind and grabbed by the elbow, she gasps and then Shaw turns her world upside down again, making the ground shake under her feet. "It's about Madi. There's been a problem at the village."
*
After the pod is sealed, Clarke collapses onto her knees, trying to keep the pieces of herself together.
The unspeakable pain far exceeds any battle wounds she has ever received. It's like crossing the Praimfaya. Being pierced by a thousand glass blades in the desert dunes. Losing her father, Wells, Finn, Lexa, Bellamy, her mother all over again.
Then she feels it. Like a jolt inside her, a contracture in the space. She blinks and across the veil of tears reality makes its way inside her like a hurricane. For one long, awful moment, Hyperion seems to be made entirely of light. No, that's incorrect. The light filters through as if between cracks in a rock.
As the light recedes, the Dust compacts back into the shape of a massive body of twilight and shadow.
“No more,” he says. It sounds like an oath, holy and indissoluble and everlasting.
His voice has changed too. It's deeper. Cavernous. Like the abyss they've been forced to cross countless times to get back to the surface.
The tear inside her closes, forged in fire like the strongest metal, tempered in heartache and in one too many losses.
No more.
*
Hours, days, months later, curled up against Hyp's new form, it's all too clear in her mind.
Clarke thinks how strange fate is. For as long as she can remember, she has always been used to the weight of her daemon's body against hers. Small bodies, even before he settled into his final form. Unlike Grounders, whose daemons tend to be huge and sturdy, all daemons on the Ark always chose forms that didn't take up too much space since it was already so limited.
It's strange to realize that her soul has become so much bigger than her. It makes sense, she thinks. She is acutely aware of the emptiness it contains, one that cannot be filled. No matter how comforting it remains, now looking into Hyp's eyes has also become enduring the darkness of her soul, accepting the weight of her fragility and inadequacy.
Hyp seems to read into her as always. “We are more than the scars we carry,” he says. “We are survivors.”
Then why does she keep feeling like this? Like she’s slowly dying.
Clarke hides her face in Hyp’s reddish blonde fur and if her cheeks are tear-streaked, there's no one to point it out. “Do you really believe that?”
Hyp licks her cheeks until there is no more trace of tears, his golden-yellow gaze mirroring the starry skies. "I have to."