A House at the End of the Road

“Did you enjoy yourself?” Lexa doesn’t look at Clarke. As they walk, hands almost touching, Clarke memorizes every crack in the path that leads them back to the palace.

“Surprisingly…. I did.” Clarke tilts her chin towards Lexa, smiling in a sideways glance, but Lexa stares straight ahead. A rush of color blooms through Lexa’s face, up from her neck, but still she doesn’t look. “Where are we going?”

“The show’s over. There’s no reason for me to stay in this ridiculous dress.” She holds out a hand to the guard in front of the largest building in the city, a gleaming white mansion with 20-foot tall columns and elaborate iron doors. “This is where I live.”

“Tiny place you got there,” Clarke says, hoping that a quick joke will distract Lexa from her increasing nerves. Why is she following Lexa? And into her room? Clarke shakes her head and moves forward.

“It’s not just a home.” Lexa walks swiftly through the hallway. On either side, Clarke sees elaborately decorated ballrooms set up with enormous round tables. “It’s where business gets done. Come, my quarters are this way.”

Clarke follows Lexa up a giant marble staircase, taking care not to trip on the giant animal skins carpeting each step. Eventually, they stop, in front of a large iron door held fast with multiple locks. Lexa carefully unlocks each one, taking her own time, moving to her own deliberate rhythm.

“That’s some kind of security. I thought Polis was a safe haven?”

“It is,” Lexa says, waving her in. “For now.”

As they walk in, Clarke is nearly speared by the antlers of an elk head. Lexa quickly grabs her elbow and steers her to a sofa. “Wait there.”

“Does the possibility of accidental impalement help you sleep at night?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Only an idiot would dare disturb me in the dark.”

“I would not want to walk in here drunk.”

“Then we won’t be inviting Nia, will we.”

“Commander Lexa of the Alliance of the 12 clans.” Clarke laughs, incredulous. “Was that a joke?”

“Maybe,” Lexa mumbles, kneeling by the mantlepiece. As she works, Clarke watches her hands, hard and leathery like old jackets, as they caress a flint, coaxing the fire to life. In a few seconds, the room is covered with a soft yellow glow. Clarke notices a handful of books by the bed, some she’s heard of, some she hasn’t.

“Shouldn’t these be in the library?”

“They will be, when I can bear to part with them.” Lexa grabs a clean set of clothes from her closet. “I’ll just go change.”

Clarke lingers in Lexa’s bedroom, watching the fire diminish into blue coal, casting shadows over the walls. An elaborate set of mirrors is projecting the remaining light to all corners of the room.

On the mantle across from the bed, there’s a photograph of a much younger Lexa grinning next to another girl, a girl with raven hair and blue eyes wide as dinner plates. That must be Costia. Their fingers lie tangled over a jade green necklace sitting flush against Costia’s clavicle. Clarke takes a deep breath and looks away. She idly wonders how, with so much destroyed, photography survives.

When she thinks about everything that disappeared after the nuclear incident, things of beauty and things of horror, she feels her heartbeat slow. The insignificance of her own self, of her own actions, hits her like a slap. She’d saved her people, but what did that matter? Others will come and wipe away the memory of everything that happened; everything she did, everything she sacrificed, would be lost to the history books, if even that. Why would the deaths of her father or her friends even matter when so many others have already been forgotten?

She looks back at the photograph of Lexa and realizes something she can barely articulate even to herself. Then she calls for Lexa to return.

---

“Missed me already?” Lexa’s face glows against the dying firelight. “Clarke, are you ok?”

“I will be,” Clarke says. In one swift motion, she walks up to Lexa, places a hand on her face, and kisses her deeply.

For a moment, for one perfect moment, they stand suspended in the hallway, drinking in each other’s courage. But then, just as suddenly, Lexa pulls away. “No,” she says, breathless. “We need to talk.”

“Maybe we should play to our strengths,” Clarke says, pushing Lexa against the wall, pressing her lips against Lexa’s neck.

Letting out a deep breath, Lexa slithers out. “Stop it.”

Clarke’s face hardens. “Don’t tell me you don’t want this.”

“What happened to Anya, Clarke?”

“Huh?”

“How. Did Anya. Die.”

---

Clarke’s left hand, still holding a strand of Lexa’s hair, freezes in the air. “She died. Just like I said.” She ghosts a silhouette over Lexa’s shoulder, pulling her hand back the moment there’s no risk of touching her.

“Actually, you didn’t say.” Lexa straightens her dress, brushing out the creases from their brief huddle.

“Do you really want to talk about this now? In the middle of the festival?”

“Then when, Clarke? Would you rather have this conversation in front of my generals?”

Clarke becomes aware of a sudden stiffness in her limbs. She watches Lexa, whose bottom lip curls in slight disdain, whose hand moves, almost imperceptibly, to where her sword should be.

“Does it matter now?” Clarke reaches in her mind for a better response, a deep verbal cut that could simultaneously put her in control and dismiss the entire line of questioning, but she comes up empty. “I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

The fire continues to burn down, and though its glow had only recently made Lexa more radiant, it now casts a deathly pall over her face. She looks almost as anxious to end the conversation as Clarke, but after a few heavy, silent seconds, she stands up straight and draws her elbows in.

“What happened, then? Nyko found her body just outside the Camp Jaha perimeter, riddled with the marks of your terrible weapons.”

That explains Nyko’s hostility. Clarke feels her heart beating incoherently, and resigns herself to the weakest option: the truth.

“We escaped the mountain together. We weren’t friends, not exactly, but I convinced her to let me talk to you. I convinced her we needed an alliance.” Clarke waits for Lexa to interrupt, but nothing comes. “She gave me the braid to show to you. It wasn’t easy to get her to trust me, but she did. And then….” Clarke pauses.

“Don’t you dare stop now,” Lexa says, practically hissing.

“When we got close to camp, they shot at both of us. I got out with a bullet scrape. Anya didn’t get out at all. I didn’t know the rest of the Ark had come down. And they didn’t know about the Grounders. About what we’d been through.” Clarke pauses. “They let fear guide their decisions. Like always.”

"You expect me to believe that?"

"No," Clarke says, defeated. "But it's what happened."

More than a few moments pass in silence, until Lexa gulps down a burst of emotion.

"We spend so much time thinking of the good of the many, Clarke. But we can never have justice for the ones we love." Lexa shrinks into herself and shuffles toward her bedroom. “You can find your way back to your cottage, I hope.”

Clarke turns to leave, then she stops and sets her jaw firmly. “No.”

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t get to hate me for this, Lexa. Not after what you did.”

“And what did I do, Clarke?”

“You betrayed me. You betrayed us. Everything we could have been, you were the one who shot it in the ass.” Clarke moves toward Lexa, backing her into a corner. “I’ve done things, Lexa. Terrible things. And I was willing to look past what you did because I’ve done worse.”

“Back away from me Clarke.” Lexa speaks softly, like she’s pulling her strength inwards.

But Clarke merely shakes her head, a mad glint in her eye. “I’m broken, Lexa. And I think you know that, because you’re broken too. And no matter how fractured we are, we’ll go on breaking into smaller and smaller pieces until we disappear. This is our fate on this Earth.”

Lexa’s eyes soften. “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

“Then what will it be?” Clarke feels her heart race, but she doesn’t stop. “I don’t want anything anymore. I don’t want to be the Sky Queen, or whatever your people are calling me. I don’t want to be responsible for my people, I don’t want to lead on this Earth. I don’t want to hurt anyone ever again.”

Clarke clutches the back of her neck and steps heavily back.

"There's only two things I want, and one of them's impossible now." Clarke can't bring herself to say it out loud, her desperate yearning to rewind time and return to her place of peace, to her little house at the end of the road. She can’t say how she lies awake every night obsessing over all the ways that she and Lilith had grown careless over the many months they’d spent in their humble home. But to say it out loud would be to acknowledge, once and for all, that it's over.

"And the other," Lexa asks, almost whispering.

"I hate myself for wanting it." Clarke's eyes begin to water. "It's you, Lexa. After everything you did, I still want you. What does that say about me?"

Lexa lifts her hand, but Clarke immediately recoils.

“Touch me now and I might actually break,” Clarke says. She wipes her face and runs out of the palace.