he dreams that they have a kitchen and she cooks and smiles with her blonde hair falling in her eyes as she laughs at his jokes, even the stupid ones with ridiculous puns. but he knows it's a dream because clarke would never cook or be anywhere near a kitchen unless she was using the table as a medical quarantine. there would never be blueberries and there would never be laughter because there is only starvation and war and bitten out goodbyes and longing looks that crisp to ash in the matter of seconds.
finn Collins falls in love with a girl that he had dreamed up the day he catapults to earth.
x
he imagines hand in hand and heart over fist when he watches her walk with authority over every other man in her way. she is Helena of troy and takes all the prisoners she wants and by Christ, she is merciful and loves too deep not that she is ever going to admit it.
she is all golden and he is the runaway pauper in a prince's clothing. somewhere in some fairytale he thinks his mother read once, the pauper and the princess ended up happily ever after. but they didn't live in a planet soaked in radiation in a camp full of criminals drowning in circumstance far beyond their control.
fairytales are for the weak, but he still sometimes wields magic in hopes that this staunch reality will engrain in him bits of fantasy. the prince conjures up pencils and sweet words and snarky stolen kisses, moments in time that will be irrelevant with blood on her hands and a hurricane in the wind. and he doesn't want to be irrelevant.
x
she drinks him up like he is the cure to her everything. he thinks that he could be. he could pass being the pauper in the prince's clothing, the rogue with the dashing wits and heartbreaking smile that steals her heart. but she is not really a princess, he decides. princesses are beautiful (not that she isn't), kind (not that she isn't), compelling (not that she isn't). but they're also damsels in distress (she sure as hell isn't), looking for a hero (she sure as hell isn't), overrun by the king (she sure as hell isn't). so, no, she's no princess.
she's a goddamn goddess.
and where the hell does that leave him?
x
mortality is a fine thread of a line that they breathe day in and day out.
he lives and dies with each crunch of earth underfoot, every crossing between his tent and clarke's, whenever their leader holds the hot barrel of a rifle against his hand.
reason is cause for madness on the ground.
and god god god he is so incredibly pissed off.
x
somedays he divides their four weeks and five days (good Christ) into segments of time with titles that would make short stories pale in comparison.
mostly they're titled before raven and bellamy and after raven and bellamy.
before is all walks in the woods and hidden smiles into cupped hands, newness to the start of an age and the start of time that he never really had thought was a possibility. he knows that it all begins the moment that he smiled at her as they crashed towards earth and it all ends the morning that raven landed in a flower bed.
(absentmindedly, he knows it ended the day that bellamy called her 'princess' in the woods with his hand wrapped around her wrist. he'd have been blind not to notice.)
after is all desolation and star crossed bullshit love affairs, rifles and whipping boys. moonshine strung parties and drug induced sleepovers that last longer than he thought they were here. he knows that is all begins the moment that raven's mouth finds his in the brush of a valley, sun screaming down on his already tanned skin. he knows that it hasn't ended yet, and he isn't sure if it ever will.
x
two days after the camp alights and burns to all holy hell, mountains aflame in the distance with haunting shadows dancing on the pines and the smell of smoke ever stuck in his nose, he and bellamy curl up in lincoln's cave with Octavia. the stench of blood and sweat is overwhelming and he cannot breathe because he just watched the end of the world before his very eyes and lived to tell the survivors.
he lays outside and counts the falling stars and wishes to fucking no one about blueberries and kitchens and blonde hair and her laughter.
finn Collins falls in love with a dead girl two days after their apocalypse.
finn Collins falls in love with a dead girl already promised to a king with freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose and eyes like golden fire, brave and ready to take on the afterlife to get her back.
finn Collins was never a pauper in prince's clothing. he wasn't a prince or a king or a god either; he was just a boy of seventeen in love with a girl beyond his reach. he closes his eyes at a futile attempt for sleep while the king plans ahead.
x
missing her keeps him more awake than anything.