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She is halfway down the corridor before she admits to herself where she's going.
Not as Commander, no, the Commander has already said everything that needs to be said — the alliance, the terms, the careful political architecture of two peoples learning not to destroy each other. That conversation is over.
This is something else. Something smaller and more dangerous. She is going to Clarke's room because she wants to, and she is tired, tonight, of punishing herself for wanting things.
She rounds the corner and stops.
Clarke's guard is leaning against the wall twenty feet from his post. Arms crossed. Deliberately casual in the way of a man who has been told to look like he belongs somewhere he doesn't.
Lexa looks at him.
He straightens immediately. "Heda—"
"Why are you not at your post?"
Not a question. He hears that.
"The Flamekeeper, Heda. He asked me to take a walk. Said he needed a private word with the Sky girl." A pause. "I thought—"
"We'll discuss your judgment when this is over."
She is already moving. Already calculating. Titus. Clarke's room. Murphy, the Sky boy, loud-mouthed and unlucky, currently housed two doors down at Clarke's insistence. He's annoying, not dangerous, Lexa, please.
A private word.
A witness removed from his post.
"My weapons," she says. "Bring them to me now." She doesn't look at him when she says it, already moving. "And inform my personal guard there is a traitor on this floor."
He runs.
She doesn't.
She stops outside Clarke's door.
Hears yelling. Titus's voice, tight with the particular conviction of a man mid-plan. A man who has decided he is righteous.
She doesn't open the door.
She listens.
...blame it on the Sky boy, it will be clean, the coalition won't question.
The words land in her chest like stones into still water. She stands completely still and lets them sink.
Blame it on the Sky boy. Destroy the alliance. Destroy everything she and Clarke have bled to build.
She thinks of Costia. She thinks of those dark hours after, wondering how the Ice Queen had found her. Who told them where to look. Who told them what Costia was to her, when Lexa had been so careful.
She files it away. The question will keep.
She hears her guard arrive behind her. She turns. Takes her sword and blade without looking. Places one finger to her lips.
He stills.
She holds up her hand. Five fingers. Counts down.
Four. Three. Two. One.
She makes a fist.
Opens the door.
She goes in low and fast. Titus registers the door, starts to turn gun raised, and the hilt of her sword meets his temple, the gun dropping with a sound like a book slapped on stone.
He goes down.
Her guard floods in behind her. Murphy is somewhere against the wall, wrists bound, doing the thing he does where he tries to look like he expected this. Clarke is standing in the middle of it all.
Alive. Unhurt.
Lexa looks at her for exactly one second. Then she turns back to Titus.
He is conscious. Bleeding. Looking up at her with something that might be remorse. She is not here for his remorse.
She lowers her blade to his throat.
"Heda." His voice is rough. Careful. "Blood must not have blood. You said it yourself. You stood before the coalition and—"
"I know what I said."
She does. She knows every word. She fought for those words. Spent political capital she didn't have, took the contempt of warchiefs who thought her soft, all because Clarke had looked at her and asked if there was another way and she had wanted, desperately, to believe there was.
She looks at him now and does the math.
If she shows mercy, the coalition sees a Commander who will not punish a man who tried to murder their greatest ally's ambassador. Who tried to burn the peace to the ground to protect his own fear. They will not call it mercy. They will call it what Titus always called it.
Weakness.
She thinks of Costia again. She thinks of the question she doesn't have an answer to yet.
She makes her decision.
"You're right," she says. "Blood must not have blood. That is the law I have asked my people to live by." She crouches, bringing her eyes level with his. "But that law exists so the innocent do not pay for the crimes of others. You are not innocent. And the punishment should fit the crime."
She stands.
"You tried to destroy peace between our people through deception. Through cowardice. You moved in shadow because you knew you could not move in the light." Her voice doesn't rise. It never needs to.
"You will not die a warrior's death. You will not be granted speed or mercy or the comfort of believing you served your Commander well."
Titus closes his eyes.
"A thousand cuts, at dawn." she says. "Take him."
They do.
The door closes. The torches settle.
Lexa turns to the remaining guard. Looks at him for a long moment. He doesn't flinch, to his credit.
"Had she died tonight, I would have started with you." She lets that sit. Then, as he moves to return to his post: "Should you ever feel the need to leave your post again — remember this moment. You won't get another chance."
He will. She can tell by the way he walks.
Lexa sheathes her sword.
She crosses to Clarke in three steps, hands finding her face, tilting it toward the torchlight. Checking. Eyes, jaw, the line of her throat. Clarke lets her, which means she understands this is not tenderness right now, it is inventory.
"Are you hurt."
"No."
"Clarke."
"I'm not hurt, Lexa. I'm fine."
Lexa's hands don't move immediately. They make their own assessment. Then, satisfied, she steps back.
"I'm fine too, by the way."
She turns.
Murphy is still against the wall, wrists bound, watching her with the expression of a man who has learned that survival requires a very specific kind of patience. He raises his tied hands slightly.
Lexa goes still.
In the span of thirty seconds she has disarmed a man, condemned him to death and cleared a room and she did not once think about the Sky boy against the wall. She, who notices everything. Who heard Titus breathe wrong in a corridor.
She did not think about Murphy.
She crosses the room and crouches in front of him. Works the knot with her dagger without speaking. He has the good sense not to say anything while her blade is on the rope.
"I owe you an apology," she says. "You are a guest in my city. This is not how I treat my guests."
Murphy rolls his wrists out. Considers her for a moment with those careful, unreadable eyes.
"Honestly Heda, given the hickey situation with Clarke, I think I got the better deal."
The silence is very loud.
Clarke makes a sound that is aggressively not a laugh.
"Murphy," she says.
"I'm just saying. Some of us got tied up tonight and some of us look like they—"
"Murphy."
"Leaving." He unfolds himself from the floor, and there it is under the deflection — a brief, genuine look at Lexa. Something that isn't quite gratitude and isn't quite respect and is maybe both.
"For what it's worth. She didn't flinch. Not once." He looks at Clarke when he says it. Then he's already moving toward the door.
"Oh, and Clarke. The blockade. You've got maybe five minutes before Octavia comes up here and drags you down herself, so." He pulls the door open. Glances back with something approaching a grin. "Do with that what you will."
The door closes behind him.
The room is quiet in a different way now. Softer. The kind of quiet that knows it has a limit.
Clarke looks at her.
"I have to go."
"I know."
"The blockade—"
"I know, Clarke."
Neither of them moves.
Clarke laughs, short and a little broken. "Five minutes isn't enough."
Lexa looks at her. At the torchlight on her face. At this person who walked into her life and refused, consistently and with great stubbornness, to be anything other than exactly what she is.
"For what's to come after today," she says quietly, "five minutes is everything."
Clarke's expression does that thing again. The complicated private thing. Then she crosses the room and Lexa meets her halfway and the kiss is not desperate, not frantic. It is deliberate. It is a choice made clearly, by two people who understand the weight of choices.
When they break apart Clarke keeps her forehead against Lexa's for a moment. Eyes closed.
"After," she says.
"After," Lexa agrees.
Clarke pulls back. Straightens. The diplomat's face settling back over the girl's, the way Lexa has watched her do it a hundred times and marveled at it every one.
She goes. No looking back.
Lexa stands in the empty room and listens to her footsteps fade down the corridor. Listens until she can't anymore.
She picks up the rope. Sets it on the table. Straightens the overturned chair.
Puts the room back together. It is, she thinks, what you do.
She blows out the candle closest to the bullet hole. Stands in the half dark and lets herself feel the full weight of what today could have been. Clarke, cold on this floor. The alliance in ash. Murphy blamed and dead and the Sky people howling for war. Titus standing over the wreckage believing, with his whole heart, that he had done the right thing.
She breathes through it.
Then she lets it go.
She leaves the room. Walks the corridor. The guard at the door stands straight as a blade when she passes and does not meet her eyes, which is correct.
In a cell below the tower, Titus removes his robes slowly, with the same deliberate care he gave to everything. He folds them first. Then he doesn't.
By morning he is gone.
Lexa receives the news without expression. She dismisses the guard who brings it. She sits alone for ten candle marks.
Then she rises.
She has work to do. A coalition to hold. A world to make worth returning to.
Hope is not a feeling. It is a decision. She makes it the same way she makes every decision — with both hands, eyes open, no guarantees.
Without it there is no tomorrow.
She intends to build one.
After, Clarke said.
She will make sure there is an after to come back to.
To anyone reading this — love who you love. Say it out loud. Say it in the middle of the corridor before you've worked out what you're going to say. Love with your whole chest, your whole history, your whole complicated mess of a heart.
Because tomorrow is never guaranteed.
Today proved that.
Make the five minutes count.
---
Reshop Heda 🫶