Chapter Text
'Before you,' he said, 'you can see more women than warriors. Cowardly, unarmed, they will give up the moment they see the weapons and bravery of their conquerors who have given them such a drubbing so many times before.' (Tacitus, Annals XIV.36)
The first time Clarke sees her, she’s sitting on a throne, presiding over her dominion with a piercing stare and a crown of braids in her hair. Her warriors are spread at her feet, a multitude of them, all long-haired and wild and clad in identical brown regalia. There’s something of the sacred about her, like the crimson cloak draped across her shoulders and her divinity are one and the same.
Or at least it feels that way.
All the other girls are cross-legged on the scratched parquet floor of what was probably once a ballroom and is now the small gym, hands folded in their laps to keep their skirts covering everything that needs to be covered. They’re squirming and uncrossing and crossing their legs again, shifting their weight and fidgeting with their hems and pulling the sleeves of their dark sweaters to cover their fingers in the drafty morning cold. They’re young, even the ones the same age as Clarke, they’re so young and wriggly and eager to grow into their bodies.
The Head Girl is as still as a marble statue, back straight and eyes surveying the Friday mess of hormones and bridled possibilities.
A girl from the lower school starts braiding (plaiting, Clarke reminds herself) the ponytail of the girl in front of her but flinches her hands back when she’s leveled with an imperial head shake from the stage. She ducks her head down with pinkening cheeks. A moment later she chances a surreptitious glance back up and then quickly down at her lap.
The teachers file inside and sit in the line of chairs at the back of the room. The Headmistress sails in a few minutes later, followed by the Deputy Head who has donned his black gown even though the Headmistress is without hers for the first morning of the week. The girls scramble to their feet. The Head Girl stands too, flickering her eyes around the room with hands clasped behind her back. At least half the school copies her stance. When their leader releases them back to the floor with a subtle nod of her chin, the only sound in the room is the shuffle of heavy woolen tights against leather Mary Jane shoes.
“Good morning, girls.”
“Good morning, Headmistress.”
This is all still new to Clarke but she’s able to follow the formalities and responses well enough thanks to the fact that literally every single person is doing them around her. Clarke is nothing if not adaptable—she is nothing if not adaptable.
It may also feel really good to lose herself in the anonymity of a crowd, to follow instead of lead, to respond rather than ask. To be a child instead of an adult.
But Clarke doesn’t linger on that thought.
The Headmistress begins to drone on about things that surely no one cares about and Clarke tunes out the words, eyes on the Head Girl instead. There’s an aura of power and awe that surrounds this dark-haired queen, something in the way that she sits on the high-backed chair, eyebrow raised and finger lightly tapping the armrest, that seems to hold the entire school in her rapture. Something that makes her seem Dei Gratia even as the Headmistress babbles on about lost property and last term’s sports finishes. The Head Girl bows her head even before the Headmistress begins the final prayer and it’s her that the girls follow, not the grey-haired head of school.
Clarke keeps her eyes open as the Lord’s Prayer is recited, high voices and huskier voices and different accents and rhythms all modulating one another into a single chant. The Head Girl’s mouth forms around the words like a well-rehearsed dance, head ducked dutifully, but her eyes are unsleeping, idly scanning the room as if she can’t imagine a single one of her subjects would dare misbehave but ready if the impossible should happen.
She captures Clarke’s stare halfway through the prayer and it feels like everything ignites, like the Head Girl position comes with the ability to shoot lightning bolts straight out of her eyes and into American girls’ chests. Clarke sucks in a breath and tries to drop her gaze but it bounces right back up to the stage. The Head Girl is still watching her but her face remains unaffected, bored even, and Clarke is only given a pair of unimpressed eyebrows before continuing her ceaseless watch over the schoolgirls.
“…forever and ever, Amen.”
“Go with the blessing of the Christ almighty, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen.” The Headmistress’s blessing is route and the school’s responsive “Amen” perfunctory.
The Head Girl stands and her girls are quick to mirror her movements.
“Ai na gon raun gon chit ai wich in,” she calls out, the words echoing through the wooden beams in the ceiling.
“Ai ste yuj!” the girls shout back, louder and with more fire than the rest of their responses combined. Clarke has yet to figure out what they’re saying— like the previous two days when she’s heard it in morning chapel from her occluded position in the far back pew, it gnaws at her that she can’t follow along like she’s been doing with everything else— but she’s not immune to the contagious excitement it incites, energy rippling through the battalion of girls.
The Head Girl lowers her chin and the girls begin to file out of Friday Assembly through the double doors at the front of the room, starting with the youngest ones in their plaid smocks and knee socks and then the main school in their matching brown tartan skirts and striped ties under sweaters (jumpers. Damn it.) The Sixth Form is the last to leave, the only age group brave enough—or complacent enough in their seniority— to chatter under their breaths as they smooth down their pleated skirts and adjust their tie-less peter pan collars.
Clarke takes her time, allowing her new classmates to push their way to the front of the queue (Ha! Got that one) while she loiters at the back, unable or maybe just unwilling to take her eyes off the Head Girl. She’s still reigning over the proceedings, elevated up on stage with arms clasped behind her back. She’s more a battle general than a queen, Clarke decides, and understands now who the girls in her registration class were talking about when they referenced the Commander.
The Head Girl doesn’t catch her eye again and Clarke’s chest feels oddly tight when she finally exits the gym and turns toward the Sixth Form Annex.
Clarke doesn’t linger on that thought, either.
--
Luckily other things take up her attention in the following days, new schools and new countries and new bedrooms and new rules. New rule-makers. Different styles of essay writing and spelling and an entire year’s worth of coursework to make up in addition to the usual workload so that she’s ready for June examinations.
The Head Girl doesn’t entirely concede her peculiarly entrenched corner of Clarkes mind, however. Of course she has no idea of Clarke’s existence, much less her disconcerting status in it, and when they pass in the halls or that one time they reached for a knife at the same time in the cafeteria it leaves a much bigger impression on Clarke than it does on Heda.
Clarke’s new school isn’t new it all; she’s still coming to grips with the fact that the brick walls of the main building were constructed before her home country was even a country and that the ‘New Hall’ is in fact over a hundred years old. She feels out of place everywhere she walks, from the high stone cloisters to the squash court to the school chapel where they spend thirty minutes most mornings, wrapped in arcane russet floor-length cloaks to keep warm. It’s all so regal, so ancient and stately, and she’s so American and groundless, like a neon green plastic bag floating in the air between the megaliths of Stonehenge.
Polis School for Girls is so old that they have their own language, an eclectic mix of some local Celtic dialect and English leftover from the era when the buildings had been requisitioned for the British Infantry during World War II. The entire school had been evacuated to the isolated village of Trigedigyon in Cornwall for several years, the home town of the Headmistress at the time. Clarke doesn’t quite understand how it came about, isn’t sure exactly how one would go about creating an entire language, but it’s somehow been preserved across several generations despite there being no written form. The junior school is taught it as part of their studies and while few (if any) could be considered fluent, most girls speak enough that their speech is peppered with it and can hold a conversation between themselves that would leave an outsider in the dark.
It means that the unlucky girls like Clarke who didn’t attend the school from the time they were first out of diapers are separated from the pack a little, or at least it seems that way in the early days when the secret words are an affront to her interloper status and it feels like everyone is whispering in Trigedasleng behind her back.
Speak the language or forever stand on the outside.
Clarke is adaptable. She’s adaptable.
So she carries a little red notebook around with her, phonetically spelling out the words she hears more frequently than others. Sometimes there’s enough context that she can figure out the meaning, other times she jots down ideas and guesses for the next time she hears it. Once she gathers up a few words, it’s easier to work out new ones and she pores over her notes like a code breaker in the resistance.
The first word in her book is Heda.
Head Girl.
Commander.
--
It doesn’t take too long for Clarke to make friends, in actual fact. Harper and Zoe are really nice, even if they barely talk when they team up at the lab bench in chemistry, and the girl in the bedroom across from her is always happy to explain a school rule or stop her from going down to breakfast in her pajamas the first Saturday morning. If only Clarke could pronounce her name. Everyone’s nice, surprisingly—the school may cost more than the median salary in this country to attend each year but there’s very little snobbery or cliques here for some reason. There are groups of friends, of course, but it never feels like she’s imposing when she sits with them and for the most part her year is fairly cohesive.
She quickly falls in with Octavia and Raven, who sit together in the General Studies lessons they’re all forced to take and share a bedroom a floor below Clarke. The first double lesson had seen Clarke hiding away on a table by herself at the back of the room but the next day they’ve left a space between themselves for her. Clarke follows them to lunch and chooses out the same brown rolls and bowl of soup that they do. She stops holing herself up in a corner of a library with an unread book during lunch hour, furtively nibbling what ever food’s easiest to sneak out of the cafeteria that day. They’re close friends, a duo in almost everything, the kind of friendship that when one name doesn’t follow the other it feels unfinished, but they’re also kindhearted and never make Clarke feel like she’s a third wheel.
Octavia’s been at the school since she was seven years old, the youngest age girls can start boarding, and Clarke can’t help but be impressed. She vaguely wonders if maybe she should feel sad instead but there’s something about this school that’s beginning to feel sacred, like it’s an entire universe unto itself and the rest of the world only a hazy mirage.
Raven’s a little more recent, joining at the start of secondary school after attending another prep school up north, and with that comes a little more perspective, a little more awareness of an existence outside the six boarding houses and main building.
Without wanting to appear too eager, Clarke learns a few casual Trigedasleng translations from them and it bonds them together even more, the two British girls laughing at her awkward pronunciations and the way her American accent wraps around the language. Before long they’re walking to town on Saturdays to shop for clothes and eat Chinese food in the one restaurant that isn’t a pub and, thus, allowable under school rules. It’s easy with Octavia and Raven, their conversations light-hearted and blessedly shallow. They don’t mind that Clarke never wants to talk about her life in New York and they don’t ask difficult questions. It must be a British thing. It’s nice.
Through snippets and off-hand comments, Clarke also begins to construct a better picture of the Head Girl.
She’s been at the school since she was two years old; her name is Lexa and it’s not short for anything; she doesn’t go home for the school holidays and home-weekends (Exeat, apparently); she’d achieved the highest marks in the country on her GCSE exams; she became Head Girl at sixteen, earlier than any girl in the history of the school; it’s because of her that there are no longer house competitions, ending some sort of bitter rivalry and uniting the boarding houses into a coalition that works toward a common goal rather than fighting for an arbitrary system of points and demerits. Clarke crinkles her nose when she learns the last fact, still annoyed that the one tradition she’d expected from a British boarding school from Harry Potter is the only one Polis doesn’t observe. The fact that the change has resulted in ten times the amount of fundraising for charity and scholarships raised by the girls due to the combined efforts of the houses helps, though.
Heda is beloved by her girls and the teachers.
Heda is the backbone of the school, the Headmistress little more than a figurehead and the Board of Governors in her pocket.
Heda is probably going to be Prime Minister one day.
Heda is sacrosanct.
Heda is as fearful as she is beautiful, all sharp bones and piercing eyes and disciplinary power.
Clarke’s pretty sure every girl wants to be Heda, pretty sure every girl would fight and die for their fearless commander.
Herself included.
Clarke is too busy, much too busy to concern herself with all this, all these new rules and different styles of essay writing and spelling and an entire year’s worth of coursework to make up in addition to the usual workload so that she’s ready for June examinations. New schools and new countries and new bedrooms and new rules. New rule-makers. But the Head Girl doesn’t entirely concede her peculiarly entrenched corner of Clarke’s mind and Clarke isn’t able to stop herself from jolting every time she passes Heda in the hallways like she’s spotted a Greek goddess walking amongst the common citizens.
--
England is a magical realm in which Art is a possible A-level examination subject and it means that Clarke is able to spend almost a third of her workload in the fourth-floor art studio that overlooks the playing fields. She paints the still-lives of fruit and hodge-podges scraps of fashion magazines into collages and when she’s alone after the official school day has ended she sketches the sinews and ligatures of the girls playing lacrosse out on the pitch, all movement and light and potential. There’s a freedom in their form, in the way they swing their sticks through the air like in swordplay, a synchronized grace she tries to capture on paper but fails, over and over again.
She’s too far away to hear anything, even with the September breeze wafting through the window, but the flow and command on the field leaves no doubt that the Head Girl must be the team captain. And she deserves to be, too. If the lacrosse team performs a perfectly choreographed dance in their footwork and the arc of the ball passing from player to player like it's been rehearsed for weeks, Heda is their prima ballerina.
Assuming that ballerinas are part-warrior, part lit-dynamite.
--
It’s surprisingly long before Clarke notices that the Head Girl doesn’t smile. Or at least that she doesn’t smile beyond a perfunctory closed-mouth one. It’s not that her expression is negative: even when she’s scolding a girl for a sloppy tie knot or writing up a group of girls for smoking behind the swimming pool building, her face remains cool and collected. On the rare occasion Clarke’s heard her raise her voice, both times in response to bullying between younger girls, it only grows stronger, deeper: there’s no cracking, no wobbling or loss of temper. If there’s an emotional expression of power, it’s what Heda seems to wear day after day after day.
If Clarke is mildly-fixated on this fact—on this girl, even—it’s only because she’s impressed with how much self-control she must wield, how much she’d like to possess a tiny sliver of that power for herself.
Sometimes she wonders if she should be impressed or if she should be sad but there’s something about Heda that is sacred, like she’s an entire universe pressed into the shape of a seventeen-year-old girl. Density like that can't possibly possess a single unit of empty space.
Then again, Clarke Griffin always struggled with the mechanics of astrophysics.
--
The last Friday of September is ‘Jeans for Genes’ day and girls donate £1 to charity for the honor of wearing home clothes; Clarke’s never seen a group of girls so excited to wear garments she’d taken for granted every day in her past life. There’s a buzz of excitement in the air, the entire school sporting ill-fitting jeans and too-tight t-shirts around their still-awkward prepubescent and teenage bodies. It’s all hunched shoulders and jealousy and snide comments whispered in empty rooms even as they preen and check their reflections in the glass trophy cases as they walk by. There isn’t a single girl who seems comfortable in her own skin and all at once Clarke appreciates the drab-colored uniforms, the literal uniformity and solidarity they imbue in a period of life that’s achingly self-conscious as it is.
The Head Girl wears immaculately-pressed brown trousers and a white collared blouse that may as well be the one from their school uniform. Her silver head girl pin is firmly affixed to the lapel, her long hair is pulled back in its usual tight braids, and she doesn’t wear a lick of makeup even as inexperienced black liner is smudged under the eyes of the other girls and there are blue eyeshadow marks on the collars of several tops.
She doesn’t smile, she doesn’t frown, and she changes back into her uniform before supper.
Clarke wishes it wouldn’t be desperately uncool for her to do the same.
--
The Headmistress cuts funding to the Art program the third week of term.
Apparently the budget simply isn’t large enough to pay for an art teacher to come in a few hours a week and sponsor the Duke of Edinburgh gold award camping trip expedition at the end of October, especially when there are only three girls in the whole school sitting an Art exam, either for GCSE or A-level. The loss has to be considered part of the common good, Headmistress Gaius explains calmly to the art crew one Friday morning after Assembly. Funding is tight, these days - Clarke’s not entirely sure how, given how high the yearly fees are to attend this school, but it is and that’s that. There’s still enough time to transfer to another examination subject since the other two girls are in lower years and Clarke’s just started, or they can take a bus to a town three times a week to complete their exams independently.
The two younger girls in the studio are disappointed but their upper lips remain stiff.
Clarke doesn’t accept the ruling.
Livid, she rallies together the Art crew and then the Theatre Studies crew and the Design & Technology crew and soon she’s got the support of the biology and chemistry students as well. They march into a meeting of the Governors and Clarke leads them in a well-researched and comprehensive attack on the school’s priorities and the detriments to defunding art programs. When the Board shoots them down, declaring equal importance for the DofE programme, which teaches outdoor and teamwork skills and Clarke can’t help but agree with, they go higher, enlisting the support of parents and teachers and anyone who will listen.
When the annual joint-meeting of the Parents’ Union and the Old Girls’ Union occurs a week later, Clarke has gathered enough fuel to blow apart the Governors’ ruling with a flawless proposal for instigating a fundraiser as part of the Gold Award advancement, three hundred signatures and letters of support to the Board’s paltry few.
The art programme is reinstated; Heda and her Duke of Edinburgh crew organize a successful silent auction charity event to support their expedition.
The Headmistress gives Clarke several dirty looks but she can’t find it within herself to care.
Maybe she’s found a little power within herself, after all.
--
The first time Clarke speaks to her, she’s sitting on a throne again, draped in her special red Head Girl cloak and her six Prefects and six Heads of House hovering behind her uncertainly. They wait for their instructions as she gestures for Clarke to stay behind after Friday assembly .
She dismisses them with a hand in the air. “Em pleni." They scatter.
Octavia cocks her head at Clarke in question as she leaves with the rest but she can only give her a subtle shrug.
Clarke licks her lips and tries not to fiddle with her skirt hem as she stands before the silent Heda. The Head Girl taps a pencil against the arm of her chair while she regards Clarke, a curious but neutral expression on her face. The room is empty now and the sound of Clarke’s heart is louder than it should be. Her palms sweat and she clenches them into fists.
“You’re the one who organized 300 people and got the Unions to vote down my girls’ Duke of Edinburgh budget.”
“You’re the one whose budget would have knocked out the entire Art program,” she bites back without hesitation, fire beginning to replace the fear in her veins.
The lights have been switched off in the gym by now and in the dim light Clarke almost imagines the corner of the Head Girl’s lips turning up.
“Touché. Your campaign was…impressive. No one’s ever turned over a decision from the Board of Governors before.”
Clarke blinks. “Really?” She hates her childish need for validation the second it slips out but she’s still disoriented by the Head Girl’s unexpected praise.
“Really. Well done.”
“Um, thank you I guess?” Clarke scruffs the toe of her shoe across the wood floor. It leaves a tiny black mark and she looks away from it.
“Regardless of what you may think, you and I are not on different sides. It is only fair that the DofE team should earn their own way. Your proposal was innovative and fair.”
“Oh. Well, thank you, then.”
“You’re welcome, Clarke.” The Head Girl doesn’t smile but there’s something about the way she says her name that almost sounds like one; endearingly British of course, but it's more than that. Truthfully, Clarke’s never been especially fond of her first name until this instant.
She supposes she should nod and turn away, nothing left to say at this point, but disengaging herself from Heda’s gaze is more difficult than expected. In her defense, the Head Girl hasn’t dropped her own stare and so they continue to watch one another for far longer than is comfortable.
“You are new to the school,” the Head Girl states after what feels like an eternity and Clarke swallows and nods as if it’s a question.
“Yes, Heda.”
The girl puckers her lips but there’s a tinge of humor in her eyes. “You don’t need to address me as Heda. I’m called Lexa.”
“Clarke.”
“Yes. I am aware.” She sounds amused and Clarke doesn’t blame her. Given that she’d called her by name only a few seconds ago. And that she probably makes it her business to know the names of every girl under her watch.
“Right. Yeah. Of course you know that.” Clarke glances desperately toward the door.
“Yes. I know your circumstances, too. It’s part of my responsibility.” There’s a split second where she hesitates but quickly presses on. “I’m sorry for your losses.”
Blood begins to reach her extremities again and the familiar sensation of shutting down and emotion suppression takes over. Finally. “Great. Thanks. You don’t need to worry about me. I’m fine.”
“I’m not worried about you,” comes the soft response and it’s so unexpectedly gentle that Clarke’s eyes flicker back up from where they’d fixed on the floor. “Your strength is apparent to anyone who looks. I only wanted to offer my condolences. And to let you know that you can talk to me anytime. As I said, it’s part of my responsibilities as head girl.”
Something about this wording irritates Clarke and she has to bite the inside of her cheek to stop herself snapping back something that’ll definitely get her in trouble. “That’s very kind,” she finally bites out. “I actually need to get to my first class, so—”
“It’s part of my responsibilities but I also offer it freely. As a…friend,” the girl interrupts and for just a second Clarke can see past the gear-shaped Head Girl pin on her lapel and the red cloak around her shoulders and the multiple girdles belted around her waist. For just a second she can see the girl - the girl who is beloved by all as Heda but known as Lexa by only few.
But the image passes so quickly that Clarke feels a little woozy and Heda stands and exits the auditorium before she can respond, the mantle of her cloak and duty swinging around her shoulders as she marches down the hallway, every step measured and purposeful. Two girls chatting in the corridor startle when they see her and dart away to their first lesson.
Clarke wonders again if she should be impressed or if she should be sad.
--
Miss Gauthier praises Clarke’s latest creative direction by the end of the next week, her faceless studies of the human body, the way she amplifies the musculature and blood vessels of the moving figures until they’re living medical textbook images. Clarke prefers to think of her charcoal sketches as the human form bare of skin and armor, free and lithe and sinuous.
But then again she also tries not to think about it much at all.