the living are hungry
The air smells of gunpowder and blood. Mount Weather's door has finally cracked open in blood and sweat and sacrifice, and Clarke knows, fuck, she knows, that the fight is only just beginning, but she can't help the thrill of triumph that lifts her blood.
I'm coming for you. Jasper, Monty, Bellamy, Miller, Harper, all of them, she'll get them out of the Mountain. She'll get them safe.
She is trying very hard not to think how high the cost in lives will be for Lexa's people. It'll be bloody, even with some of the Ark's guns with them, in the hands of her own people. Avoiding genocide -- an ugly word, a dirty word -- will have a cost, but even if the Mountain folk live like vampires on the blood of the grounders, there's no excuse for murdering children whose only crime was to be born.
And then Lexa, the blood on her face in stark contrast to the dark bruises of her warpaint, ordering her troops to stand down.
"What did you do?" Clarke asks, the words half-rage and half-fear and half sudden, horrified, inevitable recognition. She knows. Of course she already knows. She has spent entirely too much time in the Commander's company, in the days since
-- Finn's blood all over her hands, his shuddering breath against her cheek, his "Thanks, Princess," a scalding benediction --
in the days since they'd agreed first a truce, and then an alliance to face the Mountain. She was there for the missile -- she, just as much as Lexa, made that choice -- and she sees in Lexa's face the same cold, controlled determination she saw then.
And pain, but acknowledging the pain will make it harder to hate Lexa and she cannot acknowledge it because -- well, because fuck, she should have expected this, should have planned for this, should have realised that it was a possibility. Lexa as much as told her it would be: You are surprised, Clarke of the Sky People, that I make peace and common cause with my enemies? And she hadn't. She hadn't, and if she can't hate Lexa then the only person left for her to hate is herself.
Love is weakness. More fool her, for imagining the affection in Lexa's kiss was anything like a promise.
Lexa's jaw is tight. Her eyes are level. "What you would have done," she says, evenly, and only the faintest twitch of her eyebrows betrays any feeling at all. "Saved my people."
The memory of Lexa's kiss is like a brand on Clarke's lips, and a distant part of her wonders if this would be different if she'd said yes instead of not yet (but she doubts it: love is weakness) and all she can do is glare at Lexa with stunned rage and try to bite the bitterness out of her mouth, but her words are like water against Lexa's stone: it would take aeons to wear it away, and she doesn't have time.
Lincoln tries, too, and Clarke cannot help but flinch as he is beaten down.
Lexa meets her eyes, implacable. There is nothing left for Clarke to say, and so she says nothing.
But Lexa does. "May we meet again," she says, quietly.
It is the last thing she says to Clarke before she leaves. Leaves, and doesn't look back.
Clarke is too furious, then, to realise that it is probably down to Lexa's implacability that she is not now a captive of the Mountain herself. Because there's no reason that the Commander wouldn't have betrayed them even more completely, if she felt she had to. Though afterwards, of course, there's no one left to ask who might know the truth, no one she could trust to tell it to her, but either Wallace neglected to ask the Commander to hand over any Arkers with her -- and she thinks that's an unlikely oversight -- or he did ask, and Lexa turned him down, bargained him down to this and only this, all our people withdraw.
Her people, and not Clarke's.
Clarke still has a chance.