the back of sacrifice
She makes herself look. She chose this, as much as Cage Wallace ever did. So many dead. Some so small. Younger than Charlotte, and less guilty. Maya.
What you would have done, Lexa says in her memory, with regret but no apology. Saved my people.
It turns out Lexa knows her better, maybe, than she knew herself.
She wants to hate Lexa. She wants to believe that Lexa forced her to this, that without that betrayal this would never have had to happen -- but she made this choice, and maybe she'd have had to make it anyway.
Maybe it would have been Lexa it the control room beside her. Maybe Lexa could've borne this more easily. Clarke doesn't know what she'd give, to be able to have given that terrible choice into someone else's hands.
(Her people. Her responsibility. Her choice.)
Three hundred lives -- more than three hundred -- for fifty. She makes herself look, but she can't make the numbers add up to anything other than atrocity.
"We had no choice," she tells Jasper. Tries to tell herself. But there was a choice, and she made it, and in its making...
She doesn't know how to live with this. Doesn't know how to live with knowing that she made this choice. That she's not smart enough, not strong enough, not good enough to have found another way. That she killed children --
That she'd do it again, if she had to. That's the worst thing. Knowing that she's done it, that she can do it again.
Or maybe the worst thing is that Kane tells her well done and means it, that her mother has no recriminations about the dead children, just maybe there are no good guys which is almost like forgiveness, that most of the survivors congratulate her like she's done something to be proud of.
Jasper's fury, Jasper's condemnation, she can't like it but it doesn't make her sick inside the way the praise does. She wants to scream Look at what I've done! in their faces, wants them to acknowledge there's nothing here but monstrous necessity, monstrosity.
She doesn't scream. She doesn't cry. She doesn't vomit. She wants to do all these things, but she doesn't, she thinks, really deserve to get what she wants.
She wants absolution. She wants never to have had to make this choice. Neither of those things are anything anyone can give her. So what good would screaming do, or vomiting? None.
She thinks maybe she's not going to be able to live with this. She doesn't feel like a person, anymore. She feels like a ghost. Like a shell, hollowed-out and empty. She tries. God, she tries. She moves, she speaks, she joins the scouts and helps carry the wounded on the way back to Camp Jaha, she eats and breathes and goes through the motions of living and every time someone smiles at her it feels obscene.
She should be glad they're alive, but all she can see when she looks at them are the faces of the dead.
Monty understands, at least a little. He doesn't say anything, but he doesn't smile when he looks at her. There are shadows in his eyes: she might have made the choice, but he made it possible.
They both have to live with that. She took away, she thinks, his last claim to any innocence. He's not a kid anymore. None of them are. None of them ever will be again.
It is two and a half days back to Camp Jaha, and she doesn't think she can stand to go back. Not among people whose first instinct is to treat her as a child. Not with the weight of this choice on her hands, on her conscience, on her soul.
Not when she can hardly stand to look at them. She doesn't want to hate them, but she can't bear their admiration. Their pity would be worse. She doesn't deserve either, and they deserve better than she can give them.
She's got nothing left to give.
In the end, she can't walk through Camp Jaha's gates. She can't go back. She can't --she still doesn't know how to live with this. She's burned out some part of herself -- the human part, the part that can feel anything other than tiredness and disgust and above all self-disgust -- and all that's left...
There's not really much left. If she stays in Camp Jaha, she thinks, she might wind up eating a gun. She can't let herself do that, not to her friends. Not even to her mother. She has to learn to live with this, and she can't do that here.
Not when she wants to break her fist on Bellamy's teeth when he says, "Hey. We'll get through this."
"I'm not going in."
He's at her side, stained with sweat and dirt and blood, his expression weary but not hollow, not like Monty's has been. Not like she feels inside. He thinks, in the end, she did the right thing, the only thing: he believes Kane when the older man says good job and well done. He sees that she saved his sister, and in his eyes that's the only thing that counts.
"If you need forgiveness, I'll give that to you. You're forgiven." Pleading, begging, uncomprehending. "Please come inside."
He has no idea, really. As if what she did is something that can be forgiven.
She looks at him, and she remembers when they were innocent. Not that innocent, maybe they were never that innocent, but more innocent than this. And it hurts.
They were rivals, at first. Allies, after; then partners, eventually friends. Always leaders, though: somehow they were always the ones who stepped up, who made the decisions, took the responsibility. Bellamy's been a constant in her life since the moment they stepped off the dropship. He's grown, just as she has, but he might never understand what she feels right now.
She doesn't want him to. Let him be spared this, at least: most of his dead were killed in ignorance or in battle. But she knew exactly what she was doing when she pulled that lever, and she did it anyway.
"Take care of them for me," she says, because that's what he's always tried to do. That's what they've always tried to do, and she can't. Not anymore.
"Clarke." He's still trying. "You don't have to do this alone."
She remembers Lexa, after Finn. What you did tonight will haunt you to the end of your days. And later, counting the dead at Tondisi, saying Victory stands on the back of sacrifice and The living are hungry. She remembers Dante Wallace, and she thinks she understands his choices a little better, now.
His, and Lexa's too.
"I bear it," she tells Bellamy, deliberately quoting Dante, and watches him flinch before her quiet words, "so they don't have to."
She doesn't know where she's going to go. She just knows she can't stay here.
When she hugs him -- hard, biting her tears back because this hurts, too, whispering "May we meet again" against his shoulder -- when she hugs him and walks away, he doesn't try to stop her.
She can't walk away from what she's done, but she can walk away from here until she's learned to live with it. (If she can learn to live with it.)
She doesn't look back.