It is the final battle of the final war.
The clans have been united as one, and the last rebellious faction hunted down, rooted out, defeated.
Clarke stands atop a mound of smoldering wood and surveys the beginning of the era of peace. All around her, her people move and gather and attend.
Not her people, not anymore.
Theirs.
She looks, scans the dirty, bloody faces for the one she loves the most. But Lexa is nowhere to be found, and she grimaces as the movement starts fires in her side, along the flesh she knows an enemy sword laid open there. But she will not waver, she will not flag. She will not taint this victory with her own weakness.
Later, her mother finds her.
Abby's hands are dark with mud and blood, and her eyes are tired. She's been sewing and setting and rebuilding the broken bodies that can saved. Earlier, Clarke watched as the doctor removed the leg of one of the wounded enemy, crushed underneath the heavy hooves of their cavalry, most likely. Friend or foe, Abby cared not. A life, she'd told Lexa with fierce eyes in the aftermath of one of the first battles, is a life.
Clarke had never felt more like her mother than in that moment, muscles tense and ready to fight as she stood up to the stubborn Grounder Queen. She'd seen herself reflected in the hard angle of her mother's jaw, the glint of strength in her eyes.
"All who could be saved," declared Lexa after, "would be saved."
Now her mother approaches her with a report of the wounded and dead.
Always too many, Clarke thinks as she fights the urge to clutch at her side, to acknowledge the ache there.
Still, she takes comfort in the fact that if Lexa had been among either, her mother would have sent someone with word.
As the Commander's second, as the leader of the Sky Clan, she would have been informed immediately.
She's not worried.
Not yet.
Something must catch her mother's eye, some labored movement or some grimace, because in an instant, Abby is suddenly right in front of her, gentle hands running over her face, her head, her body until, with a gasp, she finds the torn fabric, wet and sticky with blood.
"Clarke," she says softly, and quietly calls over her apprentice, instructing him to gather supplies discreetly and meet her in the Commander's tent. Abby, it seems, has learned enough of Grounder culture to know that Clarke cannot falter, not even now.
Inside, she settles her daughter onto the bed and begins to pull off the sweaty layers of coarse fabric. She'll burn them later, Clarke knows, and good riddance. If she never adorns her battle clothes again, she'll die a happy woman.
Her body is no longer the unmarred perfect flesh that Abby remembers birthing. Years of war have written their violent history upon her daughter's skin. In times of peace, she's inked memorials and epitaphs along her hard, tired limbs.
She wets a cloth and begins to wash away the blood that stains Clarke's face, the water in the bowl turning red and then black as Abby cleans away the death and the darkness from her daughter. She catalogues the injuries—a cut over Clarke's eyebrow that could use stitches, a bruise forming under the delicate skin of her eye. Scrapes and scratches here and there, Abby addresses them all without a word.
When she reaches the side that Clarke, naked, still clutches, she shudders. It takes a few minutes to clean the wound, to peel away the fabric that has dried into the bare, open flesh. Clarke gasps and fidgets under her touch, and Abby takes a moment to swallow a sob as she sees the long, open gash from her baby's kidney down into her thigh.
How Clarke fought, how Clarke threw herself into the fray time and time again with this open, weeping wound, Abby will never know. Her daughter is so much stronger than she ever dreamed, hard with the kind of strength that makes mothers drown their children, slit their tender throats, set fire to their beds as they sleep in furious act of desperate maternal love.
The kind of loving act that means "I may not be able to save you from this death, but at least I can save you from what the world would have you become."
Abby was never strong enough to save her daughter from becoming this.
She sends York out for more bandages and thread, a bottle of strong spirits, and then whispers to Clarke to lift her hips—she needs to get her pants off to sew up the lower half of the wound. Clarke doesn't even open her eyes.
"Has there been …," she whispers, and Abby doesn't need to hear the rest to know what her child is asking, whom her daughter is asking after.
"Not yet," she answers, and then shoos York out again, telling him to check on the wounded. She'll take care of her daughter on her own, leave him to see to the moaning and groaning in the long hospital tents.
"Here," Abby says, holding the bottle of spirits up to Clarke's lips, "take a sip or two of this—I've got to debride your leg and it will hurt."
She takes a swig herself before beginning to clean out the flecks of fabric, of ash, of dirt and who knows what else that have become embedded into the flesh of her daughter's thigh. Clarke, falling under the alcohol's sweet, numb spell, barely flinches.
Finally, finally the wound is clean and ready to be dressed, to be closed.
Abby brings over the candles—the tent is dark now but for this corner, the bed of furs upon which her daughter breathes heavily, lazily. For the first time, as the flickering candles dance over Clarke's strong, muscled thighs, she notices the darkness staining at the junction where they meet.
They startle her, these dark bruises on her daughter's thighs. More marks of violence upon Clarke's once-smooth skin. Long hours of riding toward battle, perhaps, or a blow meant for the more delicate, the more tender organs just above.
She dismisses them and begins the painstakingly slow process of stitching her daughter back together, joining flesh to flesh. She thinks of the irony, this flesh she made, this flesh she created and carried and bore. Now she pieces it back together, now she looks over her daughter's torso and sees the zippering of wounds she's repaired, scars she's had a hand in creating.
Finally, hands cramping from the strain of such delicate work, eyes squinting against the orange glow of the candles, the wound is closed. Abby gently ties off the thread and looks up toward the head of the bed, startling at Clarke's wide, unfocused staring back at her.
"I'm just going to wash off the rest of this blood and dirt" she says quietly, gesturing toward the long, lean legs, and Clarke closes her eyes again.
Here, if nowhere else, Clarke still looks so young. Her face is relaxed and her fingers clumsy as she plays with the corner of a blanket. Here, if nowhere else, Abby thinks back to baby fat and sweet toddler hugs and wet open-mouthed kisses. Here, Abby remembers that Clarke's first word was "Da," and her second something that sounded suspiciously like "No."
Here, Abby pretends that her daughter is still free and innocent and that nightmares never break her from her sleep.
She shakes her head. It's easier—it's better, perhaps—not to remember.
York has brought new, clean water, and she picks up another rag, begins washing away the grime from the inside of Clarke's thighs, her uninjured leg. War is a messy, dirty business, she thinks.
It's then that she realizes what they are, the black markings.
Not bruises.
Not dirt.
Dark angel's wings.
Or, she considers, the dark eyes of a queen, not quite dry, just before she rides into war.
It seems her daughter wears warpaint into battle after all.
It seems there's more to her, to the Commander, to them, than meets the eye.
Once upon a time, perhaps, Abby would have been upset by this, disturbed at who her daughter has chosen to give her heart.
But not now. Not after all this.
Now she's just amused she didn't see it sooner.
Now she's just relieved that war and loss and Earth haven't stolen all of her daughter's light, all of her daughter's love.
Someone throws back the heavy fabric that blocks the door, and Abby reaches for the heavy pair of sharp scissors on the bed as she throws a fur over her sleeping daughter's naked, vulnerable body.
But there is no threat.
There is just Lexa.
Tall and dark and eyes wild with what Abby now realizes is love. Fear and love.
She puts the scissors down and rises—it will take time to remember how to act in times of peace.
"Commander," she whispers, lifting a finger to her lips, "you have brought peace to the clans—congratulations."
But Lexa looks past her, toward Clarke's pale face on the bed behind them.
The muscles along Lexa's jaw clench, and her fingers tremble with the effort of staying still, of holding herself back from Clarke's side.
"She asked after you," the doctor says quietly, "I am glad to see that you are alive and well."
The Commander's eyes dart quickly from daughter to mother and back, the unspoken question deafening in its intensity.
"Asleep," Abby says, "a minor wound." She takes a step to the side, "Go to her and see for yourself. I will be back in moments with fresh water to clean your own, Heda."
It's the first time she's used the title.
The significance isn't lost on either of them.
But Lexa does as Abby suggests, and the last sight of them that the doctor has before she makes her way the weak sunlight of dawn, is of Lexa, woman become god, gently kissing her sleeping daughter's forehead.
It's an auspicious start for this new era of peace.
