he dies for you
Raven's plan is stupid. Killing the Commander will achieve nothing except the destruction of what's left of the Ark. Even if Clarke could kill her: for all her slenderness, Lexa looks like muscle and whipcord beneath her armour, and moves with perfectly balanced grace.
Besides, she's seen the Commander's glance dip to her sleeve. Lexa knows she has a knife -- or at the very least suspects.
Clarke's not used to being looked at the way the Commander is looking at her. The Hundred look -- looked -- at her like they expect her to know what to do, like they were expect her to be able to make things right, a combination of trust and hope and occasional resentment that makes her feel old and very tired and sometimes intensely frustrated: she never asked for this, but they trust her and they're hers.
The adults of the Ark look at her like she hasn't fought and healed and killed and bled. They see a child, a teenager, the girl she used to be back before a year of solitary with the near-certainty of execution at the end of it, back before the dropship, back before the ground. (Back before she knew her mother killed her father for wanting to tell the truth.) They look at her like they expect her to trust them, and talk over her with the certainty that because they were in charge on the Ark, they know what to do on the ground.
(It's different down here. It's dirtier. It's not sterile, and it's not clean, and it might be more forgiving of mistakes than vacuum but they understood vacuum. Down here, nothing's simple. Nothing's safe.)
Finn killed for her, so the blood of those eighteen innocents are on her hands as much as his. She's a killer in so many different ways. The village she didn't know they would be destroying, when they sent up the flares -- too little too late to save three hundred lives on the Ark -- that Bellamy's selfishness left them no other choice but to try. Anya's Tris, after the explosion on the bridge. The man whose throat she cut to escape. The three hundred Grounder warriors burned alive by the inferno of the dropship's engines. And Anya's blood is on her hands, too. She was careless. She should have known better.
But she's walked into the Commander's camp twice, alone and without escort, and let the warrior called Indra draw blood without flinching. She's tried to trade for Finn's life (she brought a Reaper back, brought Lincoln back, and it's not enough). And she's begged. She's begged, because that's all she has left. Finn is -- he's an idiot and a murderer, but he loves Clarke and Raven loves him, and he doesn't deserve to die this badly.
And Lexa looks at her with something like respect. Something like understanding, though her utter refusal to be swayed by any argument is cool, controlled, and absolute.
"Can I," Clarke says at last, and her voice is cracked and broken, because she knows what she has to do, the only thing she can do, if the Commander lets her, and Oh God, it hurts. "Can I say goodbye?"
It's not murder, Clarke tells herself. It's triage.
She hates the respect it the Commander's eyes. She hates that the only mercy the grounders have to offer -- that Lexa allows her -- is the cruellest one.
But oh, God. She understands it, too. It's still mercy.
Blood must have blood, the Commander said, and there's no way a leader in this kind of culture can afford to look weak